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AFP
WASHINGTON
NINE scientists were recognised on Wednesday with a 'Breakthrough Prize', a $3 million Silicon Valley-funded award meant to confer Oscars-style glamour and prestige on the basic sciences.
The prizes in physics, life sciences and mathematics went to six men and three women, including four researchers who shared two prizes and five who get the full reward to themselves.
Vincent Lafforgue, of France's National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), was awarded the prize in mathematics for groundbreaking work in multiple areas.
Five US-based researchers who won prizes in the life sciences included Frank Bennett and Adrian Krainer, from companies in Carlsbad, California and Long Island, New York.
They were recognised for their discovery of a DNA-linked process that led to a treatment for a rare infantile disorder, spinal amyotrophy.
They were joined by Chinese-born scientists Xiaowei Zhuang (Harvard), who developed a new tool for super-resolution molecular imagery, and Zhijian 'James' Chen (University of Texas), for his discovery of a DNA-sensing enzyme that could be associated with auto-immune disorders.
The US-based contingent was completed by Angelika Amon, an Austrian researcher at MIT, for determining the consequences of aneuploidy, when a cell does not have the normal number of chromosomes.
The physics prizes went to Charles Kane and Eugene Mele (University of Pennsylvania) and Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Oxford), an astrophysiciest who was the recipient of a special prize in fundamental physics.
Six $100,000 awards also were given to 12 researchers for promising early career work.
The 'Breakthrough Prize' is only six years old but it is far more lavish than the coveted Nobel, which comes with prize money of around $1 million and is often shared by two or three laureates.
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18/10/2018
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