Geek Chic — The Breakthrough Prizes for math and science at NASA with Vanity Fair and French Laundry organizing the spectacle tonight. And Christina Aguilera sang Beautiful: http://youtu.be/-EJPQT52WQs
I especially liked the life sciences prizes:
• Alim Louis Benabid for the discovery and pioneering work on the development of high-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS), which has revolutionized the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. One of his patients, who used to be a writing contortionist bound to a wheel chair, was now able to walk on stage to present the award… a very touching moment.
• Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes, with wide-ranging implications across biology and medicine. This is the Cas9 discovery behind CRISPR.
* C. David Allis for the discovery of covalent modifications of histone proteins and their critical roles in the regulation of gene expression and chromatin organization, advancing the understanding of diseases ranging from birth defects to cancer.
* Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of a new world of genetic regulation by microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that inhibit translation or destabilize complementary mRNA targets.
Leave a Reply