The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences may not be the Nobel Prize, but the 11 inaugural winners aren't likely to complain. The researchers and scientists honored last week each get $3 million, more than twice the cash that comes with the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology.
The Breakthrough Prize sponsors are a group of tech heavyweights, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Genentech Chairman Art Levinson.
The winners, mostly American, represent some boldface institutional names in medicine and research, including Princeton University, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins Medicine.