Conversation

For the past five years, David Liu – a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research facility in Massachusetts
– has marked Thanksgiving by handing over his entire annual salary, after taking care of taxes, to the staff and students in his laboratory.

It started as the pandemic broke and Liu heard that students who wanted to cycle instead of taking public transport could not afford bicycles.

Given how hard they worked and how little they were paid, Liu stepped in.
He couldn’t unilaterally raise their incomes, so emailed them Amazon eGift cards.
This ran into problems too, however. “Everyone thought they were being scammed,” he recalls. And so he switched to writing cheques.

As the co-founder of several companies, Liu can make ends meet without his Harvard salary,
and has set up a charitable foundation to further scientific research.
Its coffers are due to swell considerably now that Liu has received the $3m Breakthrough prize for life sciences, which he was presented with on Saturday at the annual awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

The Breakthrough prizes, described by their Silicon Valley founders as the Oscars of science, are awarded annually to scientists and mathematicians chosen by committees of previous winners.
This year, two further life sciences prizes were given for landmark research on multiple sclerosis and GLP-1 agonists, better known as “skinny jabs”.

Other winners on the night were Dennis Gaitsgory, a mathematician in Bonn, for his work on the Langlands program, an ambitious effort to unify disparate concepts in maths,
and more than 13,000 researchers at Cern for testing the modern theory of particle physics.

Liu was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing.
Base editing was first used in a patient at Great Ormond Street in London, where it saved the life of a British teenager with leukaemia.
Scientists have worked on gene editing for more than a decade.
Progress, they hope, will lead to therapeutics that correct the mutations responsible for thousands of genetic diseases.
But the first generation of gene editing tools had limited success:
they were good at disabling faulty genes, but not at correcting them
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/05/david-liu-gene-editing-breakthrough-prize?CMP=aus_bsky