GoKawiilDavid Hertzog (left) and Katherine High were among the winners of this year’s Breakthrough prizes.Credit: Dennis R. Wise & Colin Lenton
Researchers dedicated to a decades-long quest to measure the magnetic properties of the subatomic muon particle have won one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes. The results seemingly confirm the standard model of particle physics, but team member David Hertzog, a nuclear physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, says that it is not yet “game over”, with mysteries remaining around why two independent methods used to calculate the model’s predictions disagree drastically. The winners of the awards, some of the most lucrative prizes in science, were announced on 18 April.
Dreams of new physics fade with latest muon magnetism result
Last year, researchers at the particle-physics and accelerator laboratory Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, announced the final results of their measurements of the muon’s magnetic moment, which causes the particle to wobble in a magnetic field1. This wobble, quantified by the particle’s ‘g-factor’, was pinned down to a staggering 127 parts in a billion.
“It is astonishing that human beings can measure anything to such precision,” says Tsutomu Mibe, a particle physicist at Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba. “The award is truly well deserved.”
The prize will be shared by the several hundred collaborators who were involved in the experiments at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland; the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York; and Fermilab. Hertzog was “exhilarated” to learn of the win. “The delight was in some sense satisfaction that this whole team could be acknowledged,” he says.
Transformative gene therapies
Three life-sciences prizes were awarded for advances in gene therapies. Opthalmologists Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire, and physician Katherine High, all at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, were recognized for developing Luxturna, the first gene-augmenting therapy to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which can treat an inherited retinal disease.
These science prizes want to rival the Nobels: how do they compare?
When light enters healthy people’s eyes, photons hit a molecule called 11-cis retinal and cause it to bend and then quickly straighten back out. But in children with two faulty copies of the RPE65 gene, the molecule stays deformed, leading to blindness in adulthood. The three researchers built on Bennett and Maguire’s initial tests in dogs and conducted a clinical trial in which a working RPE65 gene was injected into the retinas of children and adults — delivered using an adeno-associated virus2.
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