David Deutsch, who is affiliated with the University of Oxford, shares the $3m (about £2.65m) prize in fundamental physics with three other researchers who laid the foundations for the wider field of quantum information. Deutsch, 69, became known as the “father of quantum computing” after proposing an exotic – and so far unbuildable – machine to test the existence of parallel universes. His 1985 work paved the way for the rudimentary quantum computers that scientists work with today. “It was a thought experiment involving a computer, and that computer had some quantum elements in it,” Deutsch recalls. “Today it would be called a universal quantum computer, but it took another six years to think of it that way.” The Breakthrough Prizes, described by their Silicon Valley founders as the Oscars of science, are presented annually to scientists and mathematicians judged worthy by panels of past winners. This year there is one prize in physics, three prizes in life sciences and one more prize in mathematics. Each is worth $3 million. A life science award honors researchers who traced narcolepsy to brain cells that are being destroyed by strange immune reactions. The discovery opened the door to new treatments for sleep disorders. Clifford Brangwynne at Princeton shares a life sciences award for work on proteins. Photo: Dee Sullivan A second prize goes to Clifford Brangwynne at Princeton and Anthony Hyman at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden for the discovery that proteins – the horses of cells – form flashmob-like clusters, with implications for neurodegenerative diseases. A team at DeepMind in London won its third life sciences prize for AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program that predicted the structures of almost every protein known to science. The math prize goes to Daniel Spielman at Yale University for work that helps high-definition televisions handle messy signals, distribution companies find the fastest routes, and scientists avoid bias in clinical trials. Deutsch was born in Israel to parents who survived the Holocaust and grew up in north London, where his family ran a restaurant. For his PhD, he worked on quantum theory under Dennis Sciama at Oxford, who previously supervised Stephen Hawking and Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal. While delving into the foundations of the theory, Deutsch became a fan of the Many Worlds interpretation proposed in 1957 by American physicist Hugh Everett III. Believe Everett – though many struggle – and the events unfolding in our universe spawn invisible parallel worlds where alternate realities take place. Deutsch, who lives off books, lectures, grants and awards, pioneered quantum computers with descriptions of quantum bits, or qubits, and wrote the first quantum algorithm to outperform its classical equivalent. He shares the prize with Peter Shor at MIT, an expert on quantum algorithms, along with Gilles Brassard at the University of Montreal and Charles Bennett at IBM in New York, who developed unbreakable forms of quantum cryptography and helped invent quantum teleportation – a way of sending information from one place to another. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our site and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Peter Shor, an expert on quantum algorithms at MIT, shares the physics prize It took years of painstaking work by Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University and Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Tsukuba to uncover the cause of narcolepsy, a severe sleep disorder for which they share a biology prize. Mignot’s studies of narcoleptic dogs traced the condition to mutated receptors in the brain. Yanagisawa, meanwhile, discovered orexin, a neurotransmitter, that worked through the receptor. At first, Yanagisawa thought orexin played a role in appetite, but mice lacking it appeared to eat normally. It was only after he decided to videotape the animals at night (mice are nocturnal) that his team noticed they suddenly fell asleep. “It was really a eureka moment,” Yanagisawa said. Further work by Mignot found that people with narcolepsy lack orexin in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Clusters of orexin-producing cells are thought to be killed by strange immune reactions, one reason narcolepsy surged in the “swine flu” pandemic of 2009. The work paved the way for new drugs that treat narcolepsy by mimicking orexin. DeepMind’s Demis Hassambis shares life sciences award for work on protein folding A third prize in life sciences was won by Demis Hassabis and John Jumber at Alphabet company DeepMind. The team set out to solve a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, namely to predict how proteins fold. Because the shape of a protein determines its function, this is of enormous importance in understanding diseases and finding drugs to treat them. Earlier this year, the DeepMind team released the structures of 200 million proteins, spurring work in areas as diverse as malaria and plastic recycling. Hassabis calls it “the most important thing done with artificial intelligence in the sciences” and a starting point: a proof of principle that puzzles expected to last longer than our lives can be solved with artificial intelligence. Before the pandemic, winners of the Breakthrough Awards, founded by Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner and others, received their awards at a glitzy, star-studded event in Silicon Valley. If the ceremony takes place this year, Deutsch, who gave a TED talk via robot, is unlikely to attend, at least in this universe. “I like conversations,” he said. “But I don’t like going anywhere.”
