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
- The Indian Express | Breakthrough Prize 2025
- Business Standard | Breakthrough Prize
