STEVE JENNINGS/GETTY IMAGES (COURTESY BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE)The 2016 Breakthrough Prizes were awarded yesterday (November 8) in Silicon Valley. Pioneers in mathematics, physics, and the life sciences were honored with cash prizes during a ceremony for the award, which was cofounded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg; his wife, Priscilla Chan; and Google cofounder Sergey Brin, among other tech titans.
“This year’s laureates have all opened up ways of understanding ourselves,” Anne Wojcicki, a Breakthrough Prize cofounder and chief executive of the personal genomics company 23andMe, said in a press release. “In the life sciences, they have pushed forward new ideas about Alzheimer’s, cholesterol, neurological imaging, and the origins of our species. And for that we celebrate them.”
Edward Boyden of MIT and Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University were each awarded prizes for their work on optogenetics, which allows researchers to program neurons to activate when exposed to a pulse of light. (See Boyden’s feature, “The Birth of Optogenetics,” The Scientist, July 2011.)
“Optogenetics’ biggest impact by far has been in enabling thousands of discoveries about how neural circuits control behavior,” Deisseroth said in a ...
