$3 million Breakthrough Prize winners announced

This year’s winners of the Breakthrough Prize, announced yesterday, include five researchers in the life sciences. Each award comes with $3 million in prize money. Here’s more about the winners: 

• Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: A molecular biologist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for discovering a new endocrine system that regulates food intake. 
• Dr. Franz-Ulrich Hartl and Dr. Arthur Horwich: A biochemist at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and a geneticist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, respectively, for discovering molecules that aid in protein folding. 
• David Julius: A physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, for his work on the mechanisms behind pain.
• Virginia Man-Yee Lee: A neurobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, for discovering the role of certain proteins in dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative conditions.