Silicon Valley Rolls Out Red Carpet, Big Bucks for Science

At a lavish ceremony last night near San Francisco, 60 biologists, physicists and mathematicians shared a total of $36 million in prizes. Eleven got $3 million each — twice the cash value of the Nobel Prize. The so-called “breakthrough prizes” for scientists were created two years ago by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google founder Sergey Brin, and the Russian billionaire and venture capitalist Yuri Milner. James Temple is senior editor at Re/code, a science and tech website. He attended the awards ceremony last night.