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Tech Leaders Create Most Lucrative Science Prize In History
redletterdave writes "Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner have teamed up to create The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation, which now offers the most lucrative annual prize in the history of science: A $33 million pot to be split among 11 people, with individual rewards worth $3 million apiece. Comparatively, the monetary value of the Nobel prize is just $1.1 million. 'Our society needs more heroes who are scientists, researchers and engineers,' Zuckerberg said. 'We need to celebrate and reward the people who cure diseases, expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people's lives.'"
or is this some sort of advertising thing? You simply cant's trust people with money and power to be genuine these days.
all 11 winners are from the US.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It's a bid for immortality. Young rich guys sponsoring biotech research? They want to live forever.
A moron who once had business cards with "I'm CEO, bitch !" thinks scientists are going to take him serious because of... what ? Money ? Dontlemmelaugh.
but why only in life sciences? other kinds of sciences are not important? they wouldn't be in their current position if there were not progress and breakthrough in physical sciences and maths. Just wondering.
The Nobel price is not about the money, it is about the reputation the reputation is from the Nobel committee. They will have to assemble a well-functioning one, otherwise it is no more than a set of private grants.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Beware of people that focus only for the money.
The Nobel prize is not about the money.
If we want to have actual heroes doing the research that will lead to such prizes, why not give reasonable career path to scientists? Right now, heroes are first selected by "who is willing to stay in academia despite the working condition", which is not a very interesting criterion in my opinion.
Yeah, I want a "prestigious" award from that guy...
And yet the amount of money still pales in comparison to what pro athletes make.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
This does nothing except provide a tax write off and stroke the giver ego.
Do real scientist do this for the money and the prizes? No.
Providing a wad of cash provides no extra incentive.
If the real goal is to change the overall culture of enourgaging science - its still misguided.
Why not take that $$ and use it for more grant proposals and set fund science VC style and get more incubators?
So the anti-privacy king, Mark Zuckerberg, is trying to clean-up his reputation a bit? Too bad not one thing that man does is altruistic. I do dislike Mark Zuckerberg because he believes people should bow to him because of his wealth. Zuckerberg is not some Nobel Prize winning intellectual but someone who found a way to capitalize on blogging. He hasn't created anything new or novel. I don't automatically hold the wealthy on a pedestal simply due to social status.
I think truly great teachers should be included. Now to be fair out of the last 20 years of school I think I could nominate two profs. Good teachers are almost impossible to find. Just like great science leaders or engineers, a great teacher can inspire, the problem is 99.9999% of teachers inspire kids to give up rather then strive ( like my entire experience in elementary and secondary ).
Don't deal out kooky HUGE prizes but start a big multidisciplinary open-access journal to kill of the current predatory leeches. This is sorely needed. The journals state their mission is to further science but the only thing they actually do is further their own bank accounts!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_journal
But of course this is not about doing a favor to anybody but as somebody suggested, a childish bid for immortality...
"...expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people's lives."
Yeah, I'll remember you said that Zuck, as I'm staring at your freshly sliced head on a pike, high atop Privacy Mountain.
There are a lot of scientists in the world, and some of them are quite cynical and needy of recognition - and money, anyway. I don't think they'll have trouble getting rid of that money.
I once had a dream of being an experimental physicist but after actally meeting some and learning about the endless begging for grant money, I realized being a scientist was like working for a charity. That fact and my handcap*, I went B-School** and I am much happier.
*-I'm fucking stupid.
** The Futurama episode with the monkey with the hat that made him brilliant until it broke at the waterfall, was something I could really relate to.
Is science driven forward primarily by individual heroes? They talk about inspiration, but how inspiring can it be when the difference between nr. 12 and nr. 11 is 3 million dollars?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
My plan is to emulate my hero Zuck - find a scientist with a great idea, sign up to work for him, copy all his notes, disappear for a while, reappear with his work with my name on it, claim the prize.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I came up with some ideas about a tablet PC that could advance 3rd world education back in 1997ish.
16 years on, if anyone could care less, I'll just post them all here in plaintext on /.
The article stated makes it look like this is the initiative of Zuckerberg, and manages to misreport the scale of this prize.
See the foundations website: http://www.breakthroughprizeinlifesciences.org/
Not 11 prizes totalling 33 millions as reported, but 5 prizes of 3 M each.
Also the sponsors are listed, in that order,
Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan
Yuri Milner
Brin, Milner and Zuckerberg just want to live forever (or have a medical condition). They have the money to fund these sorts of things, so might as well start investing into it while you're young. I don't know their religious views, but if it involves not believing in the existence of an afterlife ... I suspect that to be highly motivating for funding a life sciences contest.
I'm kind of surprised that Elon Musk isn't involved with this some how.
>>> ... this prize will re-energize the medical field to continue their endeavors to research and battle cancer, Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease and diabetes, among other medical maladies.
Great just what we need (not), just like the Gates foundation and pretty much every "charity" out there, yet another funding source for destroying natural slelection in humans uand extending peoples lives even though we are already very good at making more people to the point where its arguable that there are already too many people on the planet.
Medical research is already a shrewd racket that just focusses on patents and symptom-supressing drugs rather than actual cures because actual cures would remove the repeat business.
I for one would like to see more money going to other more urgent and/or altruistic causes. Environmental research, theoretical physics, space, etc.
>> ...which will be made available to the public to help keep citizens informed on the latest developments in the science and medical fields.
The thing people always seem to miss with these prizes that the football and oscar people don't? Marketing. If you want the average citizen to care, you need to MAKE them care. Take 5 of that 33 million and use it to film a series detailing some of the competitors. Focus on their personal investments in their inventions, their struggles, etc. so that people become invested in them as human beings. Spend some more money to advertise the shit out of it during prime time and on various interweb outlets like Hulu.
When the awards show happens, and it should be a show, book a couple major performances and a popular celebrity as host. Invite some major celebrities with philanthropic or scientific interests and ensure they get a good amount of screen time talking about what's going on.
Embracing that sort of celebrity culture is a kind of selling out, but it's a kind that needs to be seriously considered if you want to invest the average celebrity-focused person on the ideas at hand.
These massive awards go to researchers who have made truly novel discoveries. They tend to be older researchers past their prime who have already reaped rewards of their research (fame and likely money).
Funding for general research in life sciences has dipped to an all time low, with success rates less than 10% (it was much higher before the economic crisis a few years ago). The top amazing research by big groups still gets funded, but there is still some excellent work that goes unfunded, particularly by young up and coming talented researchers. These young investigators don't yet have a name for themselves, and unfortunately that impedes their ability to get grants and thus do their research.
The Gates foundation is an excellent example of how this can be done -- In today's economy, I would prefer to see something similar than a massive pot going to a few amazing but well established researchers. Of course this wouldn't have made the news if it wasn't over the top...
'We need to celebrate and reward the people who cure diseases, expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people's lives.'
Yes we do.
Maybe we should start by paying them more than the Wall Street and corporate board parasites? Come on. One? Three million bucks? As a one-time lump sum? Are you kidding me? What's the -yearly salary- of Wal-Mart's CEOs and heirs? How is Oprah so wealthy? Are the folks at the LHC who recently expanded human knowledge rewarded as handsomely as the drama-queen talkshow hostess? There's a joke in there about discovering what's been responsible for Oprah's fluxuating mass.
Still, though. Single-digit millions for such "important people" -- bestowed by people who are worth a hundred times that much... yeah. So sincere.
Flipping them a quarter and snarking over one shoulder "Don't spend it all in one place" while climbing into your limo is pretty damn transparent.
The problem with promoting "heroes" is that everybody else can go and suck it. Throwing money at projects is a nice sentiment, but this is not how scientific progress works. A society or a group needs to promote a sufficiently large community of scientists, and every once in a while something really great pops out. It's a lot like catching fish: often what you really need is a bigger net. To that end, what isn't need is some token prize to hand out to a couple of "winners". This is the route you take if you want good press and a tax break. But if you want results, real progress, what you need is to promote scientific careers that, you know, pay a decent fucking wage.
So I guess what he left unsaid was:
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Listening to NPR last night about this, they mentioned that the majority of the recipients already work for very large, well-funded institutions...and the money is going directly to the scientists, not being specified for actual research. So...how is this helping science? If they wanted to help scientists, they should make the money available as grants and give them to scientists who need funding.
-merlyn
Zuck wants to make it to the singularity. Sadly he probably will - the thought of him being alive in 1000 years is disheartening.
It's a bit like a reality show with big prizes for a few superachievers who overcame other competitors. This is more an advertising stunt for the group of rich individuals sponsoring this. How is this going to promote science and investigation among the not so elite, which is the problem you have right now? Sure a few kids will fall for the flashy get-rich-quick appeal of the show. Until they become aware of the long hours needed to attain even a modest level of competence. Then the shine disappears.
I am not a tax accountant, but there could probably be an "solution" involving stock options or such that the tax on capital gains would be about 15%.
That would be about a half a million dollars that the government didn't get they hands on.
Did they raise 1 billion so that these prices can be awarded annually?
Anyone else getting a High Risk Website Blocked warning when they try the link? (www.breakthroughprizeinlifesciences.org)
Sophos web protection is warning of Mal/HTMLGen-A on the site.
I, for one, welcome our new competitively philanthropic overlords.
The new found social, political, and economic clout that modern day intellectuals are receiving as an outcome of the digital revolution is welcome and long overdue. The prize-ification of discovery and invention is a reflection of a shift in the priorities of our culture as a whole. The PBS Idea Channel has argued that in the modern area, societies pursuit of greatness has largely focused on athletics. That the money for, attention to, and veneration of athletes is what is largely driving the steady crushing of one record of physical acheivement after another.
Prizes like this, the X Prize, bug bounties, crowdsourced funding of science and technology research... all of this is a reflection of gradually shifting priorities. We are slowly redefining what it means to be a winner or a hero. Even if this sort of activity is a relatively minor contribution to the overall progress of civilization, it is a welcome sign of the times.
(P.S. Not watching the Idea Channel yet? Put away your re-tread oblig. XKCD links and get thee to Youtube.)
If I were one of the scientist and researchers who received $3 million, the first thing that I would do is retire. Don't need to go to work anymore.