Science is by nature an iterative process. For every question a scientist might answer, more questions arise. The results of these investigations guide us, step by inquisitive step, to a deeper awareness of our universe.
But some lines of inquiry do more. They provide a path toward unraveling the most profound mysteries we can imagine: the emergence of consciousness, the search for life on Earth-like planets, and the creation of programmable matter.
Every two years, The Kavli Prize is awarded to scientists whose work has transformed the fields of neuroscience, nanoscience or astrophysics. We asked three of this year’s prize winners about those eureka moments, when nature reveals a tightly held secret. Their tales highlight their persistence and boldness in venturing into uncharted territory, and those rare flashes of insight when answers are glimpsed that forever alter our understanding of the world.
Paddy Mills
Co-recipient of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics: Sara Seager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sara Seager shared The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics with David Charbonneau finding and characterizing exoplanets—those that orbit stars other than our Sun—and their atmospheres. Fresh out of graduate school at Harvard, where she modeled the atmospheres of giant “hot Jupiter” exoplanets, Seager realized that by observing Earth-like exoplanets that passed in front of a star, or “transits,” astronomers could reveal chemicals in the atmosphere that were potential signs of life.
I have this ability to focus with intense persistence. I credit my autism with that. When I was finishing my thesis, I became obsessed with transiting planets. Something deep inside me told me transits were going to be what moved the field forward.
I started working on this idea that when a planet moves in front of its star, the starlight will filter through the planet’s atmosphere—and that the spectral features of the atmosphere’s gases would then be imprinted on the starlight. The gist of it is that we can look for the wavelength where the transiting planet appears the tiniest bit bigger—because its atmosphere is strongly absorbing and so it blocks out a little more of the starlight. We can then map out which atoms or molecules are responsible.
I suggested looking for sodium, the gas found in streetlights. At the temperatures of these hot Jupiters, sodium absorbs very strongly at visible wavelengths. So, like a skunk spray, even tiny amounts produce a huge signal.
When I found out that Dave Charbonneau had discovered the first transiting planet, I dropped everything so I could get my paper out the door. My theory about using transit transmission to study exoplanet atmospheres was no longer a random idea for the future—it was an idea for now.
Paddy Mills
Co-recipient of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience: Chad Mirkin, Northwestern University
Chad Mirkin shared The Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with Robert Langer and Paul Alivisatos for engineering nanomaterials with biological function to study, diagnose and treat disease. Mirkin designed a novel particle he dubbed a spherical nucleic acid: a gold ball a tenth the size of a typical virus, covered with a dense array of DNA or RNA chains designed to bond with target genetic sequences. Then came the Friday afternoon experiment.
On a Friday afternoon, you should try something impossible, something you might not think will work—just because you’re curious. If it doesn't work, go have a beer and talk about how silly that experiment was. If it does work, come to my office for a high five. If we hadn’t done that experiment, we never would have discovered that spherical nucleic acids are actively and rapidly taken up by cells. That was an “aha moment.”
Once you can move large amounts of nucleic acids into cells, you can begin to ask how to use this tool to understand how cells work, to knock down gene expression, or to differentiate abnormal cells from healthy ones. That set us down the path of developing technologies that could change the field of medicine, including a series of therapeutics, some of which have shown the ability to cure forms of cancer.
My dream is at the end of the day, we will have developed every building block you could possibly need to make a material with any property—for example, the ability to bend light and act as a cloaking material. We love targets like that, because it really challenges us to think.
Paddy Mills
Co-recipient of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience: Doris Tsao, University of California, Berkeley
Doris Tsao shared The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Nancy Kanwisher and Winrich Freiwald for their discovery of the highly specialized brain region used to recognize and identify faces. Tsao used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and single-neuron recording techniques on macaque monkeys to locate and listen to individual neurons—and she was amazed to find that she could crack the code the cells were using to represent faces.
I figured that showing monkeys pictures of faces and other objects would be maybe a two-hour experiment, and if it didn’t work out, it would just be a lark. We showed a monkey pictures of faces and other objects: vegetables and fruits, hands and bodies, technological objects, and just scrambled patterns. And there was one brain region that would light up on fMRI scans only for faces.
Winrich Freiwald and I did the first recording from a face patch. We stuck our electrode into this patch of brain tissue, amplified the electrical signals, and sent them through a speaker, so we could hear the cell firing. The first cell we were recording responded every time we showed the monkey a face. The next cell was also face selective. It wasn’t until maybe the fifth or sixth cell we realized that, whoa, every cell in this area is selective for faces. I was on a cloud.
Years later my postdoc Steven Chang insisted on going after this big problem. We showed a monkey 2000 faces while recording from individual cells. We found that we could reconstruct each face that the monkey was seeing based on the activity of just 205 face cells.
Of course, there's so much left to discover. Understanding how the brain represents space and objects in space is such a beautiful and mysterious problem.
To learn more about the work of Kavli Prize Laureates, visit kavliprize.org.
