Scientists who restored sight to patients at risk of blindness with a gene therapy have been chosen as winners of the Breakthrough Prize, known as the "Silicon Valley Nobel" and the "Oscars of science," and will receive 4.4 billion won in prize money. Physicists who defined the magnetic properties of muons, the fundamental particles that make up the universe, and mathematicians who explained how complex systems change over time also won honors.
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation said on the 18th that it awarded this year's Breakthrough Prize in life sciences to Jean Bennett, Albert Maguire, and Katherine High of the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, who developed Luxturna, a gene therapy for inherited retinal disease.
The Breakthrough Prize is a basic science award founded in 2012 by venture investor Yuri Milner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. This year, five teams were selected as winners in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. Each will receive $3 million (about 4.4 billion won) in prize money, more than double the Nobel Prize. The ceremony took place Saturday night in Los Angeles in a lavish, festive atmosphere.
◇ "I saw my kids' faces for the first time"… the miracle of curing blindness
Luxturna is the first gene therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for patients with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). The cause of this disease is a mutation in the RPE65 gene. As a result, a molecule called 11-cis retinal, which detects light in the retina, is altered, leading to blindness. The research team succeeded in restoring vision by loading a normal gene into an adeno-associated virus (AAV), which is harmless to the human body, and injecting it directly into the retina.
Bennett and Maguire, a married couple, first tested gene therapy in dogs, and based on those results, successfully conducted clinical trials with Professor High to inject the gene therapy into the retinas of children and adults. One patient in the trial said after treatment, "I saw my child's face for the first time and could even make out tree branches swaying in the wind."
Bennett and Maguire first met as brain dissection lab partners at Harvard Medical School and are also known for adopting two dogs, Venus and Mercury, that had been treated for retinal disease during their research. High said she would donate her share of the prize money to charities and hospitals.
Another life sciences winner, Rosa Rademakers of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and Bryan Traynor, a neurology specialist at the U.S. National Institute on Aging, each discovered that frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease) are caused by a common genetic mutation in C9ORF72. The finding is considered a breakthrough that identified the link between dementia, which affects the brain, and motor diseases, which affect the spinal cord.
The third life sciences prize went to Stuart Orkin of Harvard Medical School and Swee Lay Thein, a senior investigator at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, who paved the way for treating sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. They found that inactivating the BCL11A gene causes the body to produce healthy fetal hemoglobin instead of adult hemoglobin. This research led to the development of Casgevy, the world's first CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing therapy. CRISPR-Cas9 is an RNA-enzyme complex that cuts and corrects only the desired parts of DNA.
◇ 127 in a billion… physics that pushed human limits
The fundamental physics prize was jointly awarded to hundreds of scientists in the g-2 international consortium, who have precisely measured over decades the magnetic properties of the muon, one of the fundamental particles that make up matter. The standard model of physics describes all matter in terms of 6 quarks, 6 leptons, and 4 force carriers—16 fundamental particles in total—plus the Higgs, which gives them mass, for a total of 17. The muon is one of them.
The large-scale project involving the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, and others determined the muon's "g factor" with an astonishing precision of 127 in a billion. David Hertzog of the University of Illinois, who worked on the project at Fermilab, said, "I was even happier that the entire team was recognized," adding, "Although this result appears to support the standard model of particle physics, discrepancies among theoretical predictions remain a mystery, so the game is not over yet."
The special breakthrough prize in fundamental physics went to David Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for contributions to the development of the strong nuclear force and string theory and for leading international collaboration. The strong nuclear force is the force that binds protons and neutrons tightly in the atomic nucleus. According to the standard model of physics, fundamental particles interact through electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and gravity. String theory holds that all fundamental particles in the universe are not zero-dimensional points but vibrating one-dimensional strings, and is considered a candidate for a "theory of everything" that could unify modern physics.
The mathematics prize went to Frank Merle of CY Cergy Paris University, a leading researcher of nonlinear evolution equations. Nonlinear equations, applied across fields from quantum physics to fluid dynamics, are notoriously difficult because their solutions tend to "blow up," soaring to infinity and becoming uncontrollable. Merle is credited with using a geometric approach to circumvent such blowups and proving a universal principle that, over time, chaotic states simplify into stable wave patterns called "solitons."
◇ "The golden age of science is under threat," winners warn
The Breakthrough Prize draws attention each year for its glitzy ceremony attended by Silicon Valley power players and Hollywood actors, and for its massive prize money. This year's ceremony drew a host of stars, including Anne Hathaway, Gigi Hadid, and Salma Hayek. But the winners themselves were not entirely celebratory. They are worried that the U.S. research environment is deteriorating due to funding cuts, rigid immigration policies, and unscientific health policies.
Jean Bennett warned, "As research agendas become politicized and experts are sidelined, we fear damage across generations and a brain drain." Stuart Orkin also said, "It is hard to understand why the scientific infrastructure that built the golden age of biomedicine is being dismantled."
References
Breakthrough Prize (2026), https://breakthroughprize.org/News/98