米国のインターネット検索最大手グーグルや交流サイト（SNS）最大手のフェイスブックの創業者らは、2月20日、生命科学分野で大きな功績を残した研究者を表彰する「ザ・ブレークスルー・プライズ・イン・ライフ・サイエンシズ」賞を創設したと発表しました。
初回として、１１人の受賞者を決定しました。そのうち１０人はアメリカ人です。一人だけがアメリカ人ではなく日本人でした。 その日本人、2012年ノーベル医学生理学賞受賞しの山中伸弥京都大教授でした。
なお、1人当たり300万ドル（約2億8100万円）です。
今回新たな賞を創設した財団は、グーグルのブリン社長夫妻やフェイスブックのザッカーバーグ最高経営責任者（CEO）夫妻らが発起人。アップルのレビンソン会長、ロシアの著名投資家ユーリ・ミルナー氏も私財を投じて運営責任者になっています。
今後5年間、難病治療などの功績者を国籍を問わずに毎年表彰するとのことです。
＜参考引用:http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20130221-00000068-jij-n_ame＞
Eleven scientists, most of them American, were scheduled to be named on Wednesday as the first winners of the world’s richest academic prize for medicine and biology — $3 million each, more than twice the amount of the Nobel Prize.
The award, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, was established by four Internet titans led by Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur and philanthropist who caused a stir last summer when he began giving physicists $3 million awards.
The others, whom Mr. Milner described as old friends, are Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google; Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the genetics company 23andMe and Mr. Brin’s wife; and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. They plan to give five awards annually.
Ms. Wojcicki said the prize was meant to reward scientists “who think big, take risks and have made a significant impact on our lives.”
These scientists should be household names and heroes in society,” she said.
Many of the first winners have done work on the intricate genetics of cell growth and how it can go wrong to produce cancer. The new prize was scheduled to be announced at a news conference in San Francisco, along with the following recipients:
・Cornelia I. Bargmann, who investigates the nervous system and behavior at Rockefeller University.
・David Botstein of Princeton University, who maps disease markers in the human genome.
・Lewis C. Cantley of Weill Cornell Medical College, who discovered a family of enzymes related to cell growth and cancer.
・Dr. Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands, who has studied how processes in adult stem cells can go wrong and cause cancer.
・Dr. Napoleone Ferrara of the University of California, San Diego, whose work on tumor growth has led to therapies for some kinds of cancer and eye disease.
・Titia de Lange, who works on telomeres, the protective tips on the ends of chromosomes, at Rockefeller University.
・Eric S. Lander of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leader of the Human Genome Project.
・Dr. Charles L. Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who has investigated the signaling pathways that drive a cell to cancer.
・Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, who discovered a protein that suppresses the growth of tumors and devised a model for the progression of colon cancer that is widely used in colonoscopy.
・Robert A. Weinberg of M.I.T., who discovered the first human oncogene, a gene that when mutated causes cancer.
・Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, who has done groundbreaking work in developing stem cells.
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（http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/science/new-3-million-prizes-awarded-to-11-in-life-sciences.html?_r=0）
