transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This is The Guardian. There's not many events where you'd see molecular biologists, ophthalmologists and geneticists hit the red carpet alongside celebs like Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera and Lionel Richie. But these worlds do collide at the Breakthrough Prize Awards, where millions of dollars are handed out for outstanding contributions to science during a swanky star-studded ceremony. This year's winners were a formidable bunch. Scientists probing fundamental particles for signs of new physics, a mathematician getting a handle on chaotic equations that blow up into infinities, and a married couple who gave blind people back their sight. So, today, the winners of the Oscars of Science. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay, and this is Science Weekly. Ian, you've written about the Breakthrough Prizes, and these are often described as the Oscars of Science, and there's a glitzy ceremony in LA. So what actually are they, and what do they reward?

Speaker 2:
[01:35] Yeah, the Breakthrough Prizes, I mean, they're originally conceived to try and turn scientists into sort of rock stars and give them this amazing public persona and image, because the people behind it really just like scientists. But they're backed by some Silicon Valley names and entrepreneurs that people might recognize. Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg, people will know, Sergey Brin, Anna Wojcicki, but also Yuri and Julia Milner, they were founders of the Breakthrough Prizes and the Breakthrough Foundation that funds these things. So the prizes are given for discoveries in the fundamental sciences and mathematics, kind of a little bit like the Nobels, although the Nobels tend to favor sort of people at the end of their careers. Each prize is worth $3 million, which I think puts them up really as the sort of most lucrative in science. And every year they have this really glitzy ceremony and they have celebrities in attendance on the old red carpet. And this year there was Anne Hathaway, Robert Downey Jr., Salma Hayek. So, you know, it's pretty high end stuff.

Speaker 1:
[02:34] I would love to know what those celebrities make of the ceremony itself, whether they're, you know, regularly popping off to the toilet to look at their phones.

Speaker 2:
[02:44] Well, it's interesting for some of the scientists as well, because they have to turn up thinking, I'm going to this event for which I have no experience. I have to buy a tuxedo or I have to buy like an amazing dress. And this is not within the experience of many scientists as far as I know. And so it's quite an odd thing for them to go to.

Speaker 1:
[03:02] Yeah, it must be a very surreal experience. But look, let's start with the physics category. And one prize in that category, rewarded work on the muon. So start me off. What exactly is a muon?

Speaker 2:
[03:15] So you can think of the muon as the electron's heavy cousin, right? So like the electron, it's a fundamental particle. It's not made up of other particles. And although it has the same charge and spin as an electron, it's more than 200 times heavier. It was discovered in 1936. And that was a real surprise. I mean, there's a classic story in physics where on hearing about the discovery of this particle, the US physicist Isidore Isaac Rabbi, he was a Nobel laureate. He famously said, who ordered that? Because just nobody had predicted it. And these are unstable particles. They only last a couple of microseconds.

Speaker 1:
[03:54] Now, this prize went to several hundred co-authors who managed to measure particular characteristics of muons very, very precisely. So who did the prize go to?

Speaker 2:
[04:06] Yeah, I always meant to look at exactly how many people were being named and therefore exactly how much that $3 million would have to be divided. But look, the prize was awarded for more than 60 years of experiments, which started at CERN in Geneva, the nuclear physics laboratory. And those experiments were later taken on by two labs in the US, which is namely Brookhaven National Lab in New York State and Fermilab in Illinois. And the scientists were measuring what's called the muon's anomalous magnetic moment. Okay, so why were they interested in that? Well, if you can make very careful measurements of the magnetic moment of the muon, you can get an idea of how much it deviates from the predictions. And the reason it would deviate is because of having these little interactions with this sea of virtual particles that sort of pop in and out of existence. So if you see, say, a greater deviation in the magnetic moment than you would expect to see, that could tell you that there are new particles in nature that you're not aware of. So over the decades, scientists honed this measurement to a precision of 127 parts per billion. And they found a deviation from the standard model prediction of about three sigma. So in particle physics, three sigma is considered formally as, in quotes, evidence for finding a phenomenon. But more recent data analysis has actually come up with a magnetic moment prediction that's actually closer to what's been measured. So it's actually still unclear whether muons in doing this measurement is going to point to any new physics. It may be that it doesn't.

Speaker 1:
[06:03] Ian, I would say the biggest category in the breakthroughs is life sciences. And there was a bit of a theme across all the prizes this year. They were all in some way about our genes. There were genetic therapies and uncovering the roots of genetic diseases. But the one that caught my eye was about a devastating retinal disease. And the story of this award all began with a personal partnership that turned professional, usually the other way around. Tell me a bit more.

Speaker 2:
[06:37] So three researchers won this particular Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences. And they were awarded it for developing a gene therapy for an inherited disease that ends up causing complete blindness by early adulthood, usually. The three researchers were Catherine High, who is now emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Amaric couple, molecular biologist Jean Bennett, and ophthalmologist Albert McGuire, also at Pennsylvania. And they had a very unique first encounter.

Speaker 3:
[07:12] Well, we met dissecting a brain. We were dissecting partners in medical school.

Speaker 2:
[07:17] Jean said it was a fateful meeting, not just because they fell in love, but because it brought together these two interests that set them up on quite a journey.

Speaker 3:
[07:28] I told Al that I wanted to learn about diseases so that I could go back to the lab and try to develop gene therapy to treat them. It was a pie in the sky idea at that point in time. And he was training to become a retina specialist. And he said, why not do gene therapy for retinal disease? And I said, sure, why not? But of course, we didn't have any of the tools, any of the ingredients, any of the know-how to do it. But it planted a seed. And as the scientific progress developed, it became more of a reasonable target.

Speaker 2:
[08:05] As the technology and science developed, they decided to go after a particular retinal disease called LCA or Leber Congenital Amaurosis. And they worked out that they could deliver a working version of the faulty gene, which is RPE65, into the eye using a harmless virus.

Speaker 3:
[08:25] So we had figured out how to deliver the gene, how to do it durably and safely. And the next step was to wait for a model, which was going to be a great target for this technology.

Speaker 1:
[08:39] Okay, so Jean and Albert continued to work on this question together. Is it possible to cure inherited forms of blindness? And then into the picture comes a colony of blind dogs. What happens next?

Speaker 2:
[08:56] That's right. There is a group of dogs who have this same blindness. And those dogs ended up being a critical part of this research.

Speaker 3:
[09:05] Our colleagues had set up a colony of dogs that were going to be euthanized by breeders because they don't want to give a blind dog to a person as a pet. And they had the wisdom of holding onto these dogs to study them. And lo and behold, one of these forms of blind dogs, the Swedish Breard, was found to have the same mutation as cause this form of LCA, the RP65 gene, was mutated. And they happened to have four puppies that were born with this condition. And we got to work. The result was just transformational. It was a eureka moment. These puppies, which had previously hidden in the corners because they were scared. If somebody approached them, if somebody touched them, they'd jump. And they were, became fear biters because they couldn't see an arm coming towards them. They wouldn't walk around for fear of bumping into things. This transformed their lives. They started running around, playing catch, playing tug of war with each other. And we knew we were on to something at that point.

Speaker 2:
[10:13] They ended up adopting some of the dogs that took part in the trial. A mother and son actually, which they called Venus and Mercury.

Speaker 1:
[10:21] I love that part of the story. It's so sweet. But let's get on to the next bit, because this is where the third recipient of the prize comes in, Professor Catherine High. And she's part of getting this treatment through human clinical trials. How successful was this? And where does it all stand today?

Speaker 2:
[10:39] One of the crucial clinical trials for this therapy was initially in Italy. And there was one patient in particular who described seeing her child's face for the first time. And she was also talking about seeing fine grain in wooden furniture and branches waving in the wind. So that was an extraordinary thing. And other patients reported similar profound improvements.

Speaker 3:
[11:03] All of the individuals have told us about how the intervention has made them more independent. They can go to school without help. They can see what the teacher is doing on the whiteboard. They can see their computer screens and not have to get around with huge blood lights to illuminate their homes. And it's allowed them to meet new friends, partners, to go to college and university and to get jobs.

Speaker 2:
[11:33] That therapy is called LuxDerm. And it was approved in the US in 2017. And this was the first gene therapy for an inherited genetic disorder like this. Absolutely transformed the lives of people born with LCA.

Speaker 1:
[11:49] Coming up, a prize for unpicking the complex maths behind air turbulence, lasers and tsunamis. Ian, the final award that I wanted to ask about was one for mathematics. And this went to work that tries to understand and solve the really messy way that the real world works. Tell me about the winner of this one.

Speaker 2:
[12:20] That's right, this prize went to a French mathematician called Frank Merle for his work on the chaotic behavior of nonlinear systems, and a lot of systems and nonlinear. It's been really successful in solving questions around the sort of behavior of lasers, of fluids, and even in quantum mechanics.

Speaker 1:
[12:38] Okay, so when you say nonlinear systems, in really basic terms, you can imagine a linear system, a linear equation, kind of like a straight line on a graph, right? So the input and the output are related in this very straightforward proportional way, but nonlinear equations are much, much more complicated. So you might think of those as curves on graphs that are going up or down or both. Slowly and then suddenly shooting way. And this much better describes how things actually behave, like, say, I don't know, turbulence in the atmosphere. So you want to be able to solve these things, but they're really difficult to describe and study, right?

Speaker 2:
[13:20] That's right. And think about these rogue waves. You can get this weird interference out in the ocean where suddenly you get one massive self-contained wave that is tearing through the water. And these equations, they do, they describe some of the systems that even a small change in the conditions can have these dramatic pronounced consequences. And mathematicians talk about the equations blowing up, which means that they suddenly leap to infinity. And if you know anything about maths, you know that mathematicians don't really like it when infinities get into their equations. Merle showed that some equations long thought to be stable can actually blow up. And he developed the mathematics of solitons to deal with this. And these are solutions to nonlinear equations, which keep everything contained and avoid all those infinities.

Speaker 1:
[14:09] The world of mathematics, it's like a totally different universe. And I've got a really nice picture of Anne Hathaway sitting, listening to this idea of solitons while having a lovely dinner. Ian, it's been really interesting to hear about some of this incredible science that's been recognised. What would you like to see rewarded next year?

Speaker 2:
[14:32] These prizes are awarded by committees made up of previous years winners. What you have here really is a process that is redistributing the wealth of incredibly rich people by scientists to other scientists. Look, I mean, I'm not going to predict what science will win because there's so much that you could pick from. But what I think is interesting is that we should really start seeing more Chinese researchers getting these awards in future because that would really reflect where the best science and certainly the most science is being done today. There were a lot of prizes went to Americans this year. And so I'm quite keen to see if they start pulling in people like researchers from China and elsewhere.

Speaker 1:
[15:19] Interesting. Well, we'll report back next year. Ian, thank you so much.

Speaker 2:
[15:23] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[15:26] Thanks again to Ian. You can read his Breakthrough Prize coverage at theguardian.com. And before you go, I'd like to recommend yesterday's episode of The Guardian's Today in Focus. They spoke to environment editor Fiona Harvey about the secret environmental security reports that the government tried to bury. Just search for Today in Focus wherever you're listening to this. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by Ellie Sands, it was sound designed by Joel Cox and the executive producer is Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then. This is The Guardian.