Magnetic muon measurements and gene-therapy advances win $3 million Breakthrough prizes

Researchers dedicated to a decades-long quest to measure the magnetic properties of the subatomic muon particle have won one of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes, worth US$3 million. The results appear to confirm the standard model of particle physics, but team member David Hertzog, a nuclear physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, says the game is not over yet and mysteries remain as to why the two independent methods used to calculate the model’s predictions differ radically. The winners of these prizes, among the most lucrative scientific prizes, were announced on April 18.

Last year, particle physics and accelerator laboratory Fermilab announced the final results of its measurements of the muon’s magnetic moment, which causes the particle to oscillate in a magnetic field. This oscillation, quantified by the ‘of the particleg“factor”, was set at a staggering 127 parts in a billion.

“It’s amazing that human beings can measure anything with such precision,” says Tsutomu Mibe, a particle physicist at the Japan High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba. “This award is truly well deserved.”

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The prize will be shared by the several hundred collaborators involved in the experiments at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and Fermilab. Hertzog was “delighted” to learn of the victory. “It was kind of satisfying to know that this whole team could be recognized,” he says.

Transformative gene therapies

Three life sciences prizes were awarded to recognize progress made in the field of gene therapies. Ophthalmologists Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire, along with physician Katherine High, all of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, were credited with developing Luxturna, the first FDA-approved gene augmentation therapy capable of treating an inherited retinal disease.

When light enters a healthy person’s eyes, the photons hit a molecule called 11-cis retinal and make it bend then straighten quickly. But in children with two defective copies of the RPE65 gene, the molecule remains distorted, leading to blindness in adulthood. The three researchers built on Bennett and Maguire’s initial testing in dogs and conducted a clinical trial in which a researcher RPE65 The gene was injected into the retinas of children and adults – delivered using an adeno-associated virus.

Before treatment, participants had difficulty navigating an obstacle course and, in low light conditions, bumped into objects or moved away altogether. But just 30 days after treatment, “they greatly improved their ability to navigate,” High says. “It’s happening pretty quickly.”

High learned she had won the prize while on a train and had to stifle a scream to avoid disturbing other passengers. She plans to donate her share of the prize money to various charities and hospitals that work with people living in poverty.

Luxturna has been “transformative for a form of blindness that was incurable,” says Omar Mahroo, a retinal neuroscientist at University College London, and is a “paradigm shift that signals hope” for future gene therapies targeting other causes of blindness.

Neurogeneticist Rosa Rademakers of the University of Antwerp in Belgium and neurologist Bryan Traynor of the U.S. National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, shared an award for independently discovering that an inherited form of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and motor neuron disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) are caused by a common mutation in the C9ORF72 embarrassed.

Rademakers, who describes the victory as “unexpected” and “surreal”, discovered the link when examining tissue samples from people with a particular type of FTD and realizing that members of their family had motor neuron disease.

The finding is surprising because FTD affects the brain, while motor neuron disease affects the spinal cord, says molecular biologist Franck Martin of the University of Strasbourg in France. Deciphering the mechanism at the origin of these two conditions is therefore “the big problem to study”.

The final life sciences prize was awarded to physicians Stuart Orkin of Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts and Swee Lay Thein of the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. They independently identified that the BCL11A This gene allows the transition from fetal hemoglobin to adult hemoglobin and has validated it as a target for the treatment of sickle cell anemia and β-thalassemia. Their work led to the first FDA-approved gene-editing therapy, Casgevy.

Unmanageable equations

The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Frank Merle, mathematician at CY Cergy Paris University, for his work on nonlinear equations with applications in various fields, from quantum physics to fluid dynamics.

In particular, the equations seemed to “explode”, becoming unmanageable, with solutions tending towards infinity. Although each equation is different, Merle used a geometric approach to reveal an underlying universal philosophy that avoids the tendency of these equations to explode. “[The solution] can seem chaotic, crazy, but if you let time evolve long enough, it simplifies into a very specific structure,” Merle explains, creating a stable wave pattern called a soliton.

Merle says winning the prize was a “shock”, pointing out that early in his career there was a lot of skepticism about a mathematician’s ability to provide insight into physics. “I guess now, with this price, most of them are convinced,” he jokes.

Physicist David Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara, received a special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. His award recognizes his work on understanding the strong nuclear force and string theory, as well as his advocacy for international scientific collaboration.

This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time April 18, 2026.