Researchers dedicated to a decades-long quest to measure the magnetic properties of the subatomic muon particle have won one of this year’s US$3 million Breakthrough prizes. The results seemingly confirm the standard model of particle physics, but team member David Hertzog, a nuclear physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, says that it is not yet “game over”, with mysteries remaining around why two independent methods used to calculate the model’s predictions disagree drastically. The winners of the awards, some of the most lucrative prizes in science, were announced on 18th April.
Last year, the particle-physics and accelerator laboratory Fermilab announced the final results of its measurements of the muon’s magnetic moment, which causes the particle to wobble in a magnetic field. This wobble, quantified by the particle’s ‘g-factor’, was pinned down to a staggering 127 parts in a billion.
“It is astonishing that human beings can measure anything to such precision,” says Tsutomu Mibe, a particle physicist at Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba. “The award is truly well deserved”.
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The prize will be shared by the several hundred collaborators who were involved in the experiments at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Fermilab. Hertzog was “exhilarated” to learn of the win. “The delight was in some sense satisfaction that this whole team could be acknowledged,” he says.
Transformative gene therapies
Three life-science prizes were awarded for advances in gene therapies. Opthalmologists Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire, and physician Katherine High, all at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, were recognized for developing Luxturna, the first FDA-approved gene-augmenting therapy, which can treat an inherited retinal disease.
When light enters healthy people’s eyes, photons hit a molecule called 11-cis retinal and cause it to bend and then quickly straighten back out. But in children with two faulty copies of the RPE65 gene, the molecule stays deformed, leading to blindness in adulthood. The three researchers built on Bennett and Maguire’s initial tests in dogs and conducted a clinical trial in which a working RPE65 gene was injected into the retinas of children and adults — delivered using an adeno-associated virus.
Before treatment, participants struggled to traverse an obstacle course and, in low light, bumped into things or wandered off entirely. But just 30 days after treatment, “they greatly improved their ability to navigate”, says High. “It happens pretty quickly.”
High learnt that she had won the prize while she was on a train, and had to stifle a scream to avoid disturbing the other passengers. She plans to donate her share of the prize to a range of charities and hospitals that work with people living in poverty.
Luxturna has been “transformative for one form of blindness that was untreatable”, says Omar Mahroo, a retinal neuroscientist at University College London, and serves as a “paradigm shift that signals hope” for future gene therapies targeting other causes of blindness.
Neurogeneticist Rosa Rademakers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and neurologist Bryan Traynor at the US National Institute of Aging in Bethesda, Maryland, shared a prize 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 gene.
Rademakers, who describes the win as “unexpected” and “surreal”, discovered the connection while examining tissue samples from people with a particular type of FTD and realizing that members of their families had motor neuron disease.
The finding was surprising because FTD affects the brain, whereas motor neuron disease affects the spinal cord, says molecular biologist Franck Martin at the University of Strasbourg in France, so unpacking the mechanism behind the two conditions is “the big issue to be investigated”.
The final life-sciences prize was awarded to physicians Stuart Orkin at the Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts and Swee Lay Thein at the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. They independently identified that the BCL11A gene enables the switch from fetal to adult haemoglobin and validated it as a target for treating sickle-cell disease and β-thalassaemia. Their work led to the first FDA-approved gene-editing therapy, Casgevy.
Unmanageable equations
The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Frank Merle, a mathematician at CY Cergy Paris University, for his work on non-linear equations that have applications in various fields, from quantum physics to fluid dynamics.
In particular, the equations appeared to ‘blow up’ — becoming unmanageable, with solutions that surge towards infinity. Although each equation is different, Merle used a geometric approach to reveal an underlying universal philosophy that circumvents the tendency of these equations to blow up. “[The solution] can appear chaotic, crazy, but if you let time evolve long enough, it simplifies to a very specific structure,” says Merle, creating a stable wave pattern called a soliton.
Merle says that winning the prize came as a “shock”, noting that early in his career, there was much scepticism that a mathematician could provide insight into physics. “I guess now, with this prize, most of them are convinced,” he jokes.
Physicist David Gross at 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, and for advocating for international scientific collaboration.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 18, 2026.
