Katalin Karikó, a research biologist and biochemist, was awarded the Breakthrough Award, also known as the Silicon Valley Oscar Award, for the discovery that enabled the development of innovative vaccines against the new type of coronavirus, the awarding organization announced on its website on Thursday.
The scientific response to the Covid-19 disease is unprecedented. Two of the 2022 awards were given for discoveries that played a significant role in this response, according to the award's website.
The innovative vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna, which prove to be effective against the new type of coronavirus, are based on decades of work by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. Despite widespread skepticism, the two award-winning scientists believed in the possibility of mRNA therapies and created a technology that is not only vital in the current fight against the coronavirus, but also effective against many diseases – apart from HIV, autoimmune and genetic diseases and tumors it also holds the promise of future vaccines or treatments, they write in the eulogy.
As they add, the almost immediate identification and description of the virus, the rapid development of vaccines, and the continuous monitoring of new virus variants would be impossible without the next-generation genetic sequencing technologies developed by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman, and Pascal Mayer, who also won the award.
Jeffery W. Kelly, who made an outstanding contribution to the research of amyloid-related neurological diseases, was also honored for his achievements in the field of life sciences.
The Breakthrough Prize for basic physics research went to Katori Hidetosi from Japan and Jun Ye from the University of Colorado for improving the accuracy of time measurement by three orders of magnitude. Using their technology, they developed quantum clocks that would lose less than a second in 15 billion years of operation.
The mathematics prize was awarded to the Japanese Takuro Mochizuki for exploring the boundaries of abstract spaces.
The Breakthrough Prizes, which support paradigm-changing research in scientific life, are one of the world's largest scientific recognitions with monetary rewards. The award, which has been presented since 2012, was created by the founders of IT and Internet giants: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, Chinese businessman Jack Ma, and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner and his wife Julia. The year before last, the head of China's Tencent, Ma Hua-teng, also joined the sponsors of the award.
The three life science awards and one each in physics and mathematics are each worth $3 million (HUF 891 million).
Traditionally, the awards are presented at a gala broadcast live on television, but due to the pandemic, the event was postponed to 2022.
Source: demokrata.hu
