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Breakthrough Prize, 2025

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April 10, 2025

Prelims – Current events of national and international importance| General Science.

Why in News?

Breakthrough Prize Foundation recently announced the winners for Breakthrough Prize, 2025.

  • It is an international award recognizing outstanding achievements in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.
  • It is also known as ‘Oscars of Science’.
  • Established in – 2013.
  • Established by - Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Yuri and Julia Milner.
  • Reward - $3 million each in all categories.

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

For Weight-loss drugs

  • Drugs - Ozempic and Wegovy.
  • Awarded to - Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov.
  • Scientists discovered and characterised the GLP-1 hormone, which aided the creation of drugs treating diabetes and obesity.

Multiple Sclerosis treatment
  • Multiple Sclerosis is an unpredictable chronic disease caused by the immune system attacking the protective sheath that covers nerve fibres of the central nervous system.
  • Awarded to - Alberto Ascherio and Stephen L. Hauser.
  • They identified the role of the B-cells of the immune system in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and devised treatments targeted at the same.
  • The duo also established the Epstein-Barr virus infection as the leading cause of MS.

Gene-editing technologies
  • Awarded to - David R Liu
  • Developing the base editing and prime editing technologies widely used to edit the DNA of living organisms.
  • They can edit the DNA without cutting its double helix, and rewrite entire stretches of defective DNA with a corrected version.

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

  • Awarded to - Dennis Gaitsgory
  • Achievement - Role in the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture.

Langlands program is described as a broad research program spanning several fields of mathematics, which grew out of a series of conjectures proposing precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts.

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

  • Awarded to - 4 collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.
  • The collaborations studied the Higgs boson to understand how they impart mass to fundamental particles.
  • They also discovered new types of particles to understand the strong nuclear force, and tested fundamental theories by discovering new processes to understand why matter exists in the universe.

Reference

  1. The Indian Express | Breakthrough Prize 2025
  2. Business Standard | Breakthrough Prize
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