Latest news with #Breakthroughprize
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Seth Rogen attack on Trump edited out of science awards show coverage
A pointed criticism of President Trump's policies on science by Seth Rogen was edited out of the filmed coverage of an annual science awards show, it has emerged. According to the Hollywood Reporter, which was one of the sponsors of the event, Rogen was one of the presenters at this month's Breakthrough prize ceremony, a high profile and lavishly funded awards programme recognising 'outstanding scientific achievements' co-founded by, among others, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and which describes itself as 'the Oscars of science'. Along with actor Edward Norton, Rogen was presenting a special prize in fundamental physics to Gerardus 't Hooft. Addressing the audience, which included Brin and Zuckerberg as well as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Rogen appeared to refer to Elon Musk (who was not present) by saying: 'It's amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science.' The Hollywood Reporter said that Rogen added: 'It's amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320m and RFK Jr, very fast.' However the remark was not included in the 'full' 99-minute film of the event that the Breakthrough prize posted on YouTube and on its own website. In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, the Breakthrough prize foundation said: 'This year's ceremony lasted longer than the prior few years, and several edits were made in order to meet the originally planned run time.' Trump's assault on the US science establishment has been unrelenting, resulting in an open letter signed by 1,900 prominent scientists in March, condemning the Trump administration's threats to universities, federal grants and funding, and triggering mass layoffs, resignations and censorship. Musk supported Trump's re-election campaign with nearly $300m, and subsequently became a 'special government employee' with the remit to gut government agencies to save money. Robert Kennedy Jr, one of the US's most prominent vaccine skeptics, was appointed health secretary in February and, among other controversies, has been accused of giving Americans 'false hope' that the cause of autism would be discovered before the end of 2025. Zuckerberg, Bezos and Altman also donated $1m each to Trump's inauguration committee.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Choirboys and a cat in the snow: the weekend in photos
Dan Didi takes part in a Hands Off protest against US president, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk Photograph: Daniel Cole/Reuters Sikhs take part in the annual procession as part of the Vaisakhi celebration to celebrate the birth of the Sikh nation Photograph: JeffA participant ignites a tree-trunk cannon to create an explosive sound using carbide and water during the Kuluwung festival, a two-day traditional sound battle between two villages on opposite sides of a river Photograph: Aditya Aji/AFP/Getty Images Lizzo attends the 11th annual Breakthrough prize ceremony at the Barker Hangar Photograph: Caroline Brehman/EPA A choir sings during a concert in St Paul's Basilica as part of the project: Podkarpacie in the footsteps of John Paul II among tradition, culture and music Photograph: Darek Delmanowicz/EPA A woman reacts as hundreds march in Lisbon to demand higher wages, pensions and better working conditions Photograph: Patrícia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty Images A man walks through a park during a snow shower Photograph: Yulia Morozova/Reuters Women dressed in traditional Han clothing Photograph: Jessica Lee/EPA Palestinian Mohammad Bakrun and his family try to maintain their daily lives despite difficult conditions in a makeshift camp by the road Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Citizens participate in reforestation day on the island of Lio Piccolo in the northern lagoon of Venice which is being replanted with 16,000 new trees to protect the salt marsh ecosystem Photograph:Fighters stand guard during a joint security operation at Camp Roj, where foreign relatives of people suspected of belonging to the Islamic State group are held Photograph: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images People take shelter in a metro station during a Russian military strike Photograph: Alina Smutko/Reuters A young girl dressed as a living goddess takes part in the Bengali Hindu festival, Basanti Durga Puja Photograph: Bikas Das/AP
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Biologist whose innovation saved the life of British teenager wins $3m Breakthrough prize
For the past five years, David Liu – a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research facility in Massachusetts – has marked Thanksgiving by handing over his entire annual salary, after taking care of taxes, to the staff and students in his laboratory. It started as the pandemic broke and Liu heard that students who wanted to cycle instead of taking public transport could not afford bicycles. Given how hard they worked and how little they were paid, Liu stepped in. He couldn't unilaterally raise their incomes, so emailed them Amazon eGift cards. This ran into problems too, however. 'Everyone thought they were being scammed,' he recalls. And so he switched to writing cheques. As the co-founder of several companies, Liu can make ends meet without his Harvard salary, and has set up a charitable foundation to further scientific research. Its coffers are due to swell considerably now that Liu has received the $3m Breakthrough prize for life sciences, which he was presented with on Saturday at the annual awards ceremony in Los Angeles. The Breakthrough prizes, described by their Silicon Valley founders as the Oscars of science, are awarded annually to scientists and mathematicians chosen by committees of previous winners. This year, two further life sciences prizes were given for landmark research on multiple sclerosis and GLP-1 agonists, better known as 'skinny jabs'. Other winners on the night were Dennis Gaitsgory, a mathematician in Bonn, for his work on the Langlands program, an ambitious effort to unify disparate concepts in maths, and more than 13,000 researchers at Cern for testing the modern theory of particle physics. Liu was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia. Scientists have worked on gene editing for more than a decade. Progress, they hope, will lead to therapeutics that correct the mutations responsible for thousands of genetic diseases. But the first generation of gene editing tools had limited success: they were good at disabling faulty genes, but not at correcting them. Base editing allows scientists to make changes to single letters of the genetic code, while prime editing has been compared to the search and replace function in a word processor, giving researchers the power to rewrite whole stretches of DNA. Together, they have enormous potential. 'The vast majority of known pathogenic mutations can now be corrected using prime editing or base editing,' Liu says. Liu grew up in Riverside, California, and traces his interest in science to playing with bugs in his back yard. He went to Harvard and worked with EJ Corey, a Nobel laureate considered one of the greatest chemists of our time. 'That was the start of what turned into a lifelong love of experimental molecular science,' Liu says. 'He encouraged me to follow my passions and curiosity.' His curiosity was not confined to chemistry. Liu read that radio-controlled plane enthusiasts wanted a plane that flew slowly enough to pilot around a room. After working the equations, he built the Wisp, a six-gram carbon fibre plane that zoomed around at a leisurely one mile per hour. Another project merged Lego bricks with the heat sensor from a burglar alarm to produce the 'mouseapult', a device that detected cats and lobbed toy mice in their direction. Video games also featured heavily. In the early 1990s, Liu hung out with Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin, the students behind the games developer Naughty Dog. He tested games and was an occasional voice actor. One performance made it into Way of the Warrior for the 3DO games machine. 'I said something like…' he pauses to adopt a mocking tone '…'my dead grandfather fights better than you'.' A riskier hobby took root while Liu was in hospital recovering from an operation. He wanted to beat blackjack and wrote a simulator to understand the mathematics. Before long, he had worked out a series of card counting techniques and went to Las Vegas to test them. He did so well that he was banned from all MGM Grand casinos and, to use the gaming euphemism, 'back-roomed' twice to be read the Nevada trespass laws. Later, as a professor at Harvard, a group of students persuaded Liu to run a class on card counting. 'The best decision I made about that team was that no members put in their own money and no members took out their own money. It all went back into the fund for us to fly to Las Vegas and pay for our hotel and meals,' he says. 'It was all about the fun of learning something really difficult.' In the lab, Liu was trying to crack a very different problem. Gene editing at the time could disable genes, but not rewrite the letters of the DNA code. But disabling genes would never be enough to treat genetic diseases. 'They need to be treated by fixing the gene,' he says. The first breakthrough came in 2016 when Liu's team described base editing, a way to correct single-letter mutations that account for nearly a third of genetic diseases. The procedure used Crispr guide molecules to find the faulty code and an enzyme to change the aberrant letter. Waseem Qasim, a paediatric immunologist at Great Ormond Street hospital, remembers reading the paper over breakfast the day after it was published. 'My kids were relatively small at the time. I spat on my cornflakes and said, look at this, guys, science fiction!' A follow-up paper in 2019 described prime editing, a less efficient but more powerful technique that in principle can repair nearly all disease-causing mutations. The benefits of base editing became clear in 2022 when Qasim's team became the first in the world to use the procedure on a patient. Alyssa Tapley, a 13-year-old from Leicester, had run out of options after chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant had failed to treat her leukaemia. The cancer affected her T-cells, a group of immune cells that normally fight infections. The doctors collected T-cells from a healthy donor and modified the genetic code so that when infused into Alyssa they would seek out and attack her cancer cells. The treatment worked: more than two years later, Alyssa remains in complete remission. More than a dozen clinical trials are now under way to test base editing and prime editing. Positive results have already been reported for leukaemia, sickle-cell disease, beta-thallasaemia and high cholesterol. But major hurdles remain. While Alyssa's treatment involved editing cells outside the body and sending them in, most diseases require mutations to be fixed inside the patient. This is a trick scientists have yet to crack. It's not the only problem. Qasim's team is treating more patients in a trial, but when the trial ends, there may be no one to fund future treatments. 'We are going to end up with treatments that work, but that nobody wants to pay for.' Liu is optimistic that researchers can find ways to deliver the therapies and reduce the costs, but he has grave concerns about the future of science, particularly in the US. He believes the recent wave of firings and funding cuts pose an existential threat to the next decade or two of progress that will have ramifications around the world. 'To me, slashing funding and people from science in the United States is like burning your seed corn. It's not even eating your seed corn. It's just destroying it,' he says. 'What can be more human than wanting to use all of our knowledge, all of our effort, all of our resources, to try to make the lives of our kids safer and better than our own lives? A huge part of that aspiration requires, and is indeed driven by, science.'
