Why Science Needs Its Own Oscars: Inside Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Prize
On an April evening in 2025, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bezos walked a red carpet in Santa Monica. They weren’t there for a film premiere. They were there to celebrate scientists.
The occasion was the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, an annual event that brings together Hollywood stars, tech leaders, and the researchers whose discoveries are reshaping human knowledge. Founded by Yuri Milner and fellow tech entrepreneurs in 2012, the Prize has become known as the “Oscars of Science,” a deliberate attempt to give scientists the kind of public recognition typically reserved for actors and athletes.
It’s working. Over fourteen years, the Breakthrough Prize has awarded more than $326 million to researchers in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. But the initiative’s impact extends beyond money. It represents a sustained effort to shift how society perceives scientific achievement.
The Recognition Gap
Ask most people to name a living scientist, and they’ll struggle. Stephen Hawking achieved household-name status, but since his death in 2018, no researcher has captured the public imagination in quite the same way. Meanwhile, the average American can likely name dozens of actors, musicians, and professional athletes without effort.
This recognition gap has consequences. Research from the Pew Research Center shows that 77% of Americans trust scientists to act in the public’s best interest, yet scientific careers remain less culturally visible than entertainment or sports.
Yuri Milner identified this problem early. In his Eureka Manifesto, he argues that society should “celebrate scientists as heroes” and “raise their profile and prestige, and so inspire the next generation to stand on their shoulders.” The Breakthrough Prize represents his most direct attempt to achieve this goal.
Yuri Milner’s Vision for Scientific Celebrity
The Prize’s design reflects careful thinking about what makes cultural icons. Each Breakthrough Prize comes with $3 million, roughly three times the Nobel Prize purse, signaling that scientific achievement deserves exceptional financial recognition. But money alone doesn’t create visibility.
The annual ceremony does. Hosted in recent years by James Corden and held in venues like the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, the event features celebrity presenters, musical performances, and cinematic production values. The 2025 ceremony drew attendees including Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and MrBeast alongside laureates whose work in gene editing, particle physics, and pure mathematics rarely makes headlines.
When scientists walk the same red carpet as movie stars, when their achievements receive the same production treatment as entertainment awards, something shifts in public perception. Yuri Milner understood this intuitively. “Raising the profile and prestige of scientists, so that they are recognized as the heroes they are, is one way to motivate further advances and inspire the next generation,” he writes in the manifesto.
The 2025 laureates illustrated why such recognition matters. Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, and Svetlana Mojsov were honored for discovering and developing GLP-1, the hormone underlying medications like Ozempic and Wegovy that have transformed diabetes and obesity treatment for millions of patients. Alberto Ascherio and Stephen L. Hauser received recognition for identifying the Epstein-Barr virus as the primary cause of multiple sclerosis and developing targeted therapies. David R. Liu was celebrated for gene-editing technologies with vast potential in genetic medicine.
These aren’t abstract accomplishments. They represent discoveries that are already improving and extending lives around the world.
Beyond Individual Recognition
The Breakthrough Prize extends its recognition beyond established researchers. Six New Horizons Prizes of $100,000 each go to early-career physicists and mathematicians whose work shows exceptional promise. Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes of $50,000 each honor women mathematicians who have recently completed their PhDs.
In 2025, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics went to more than 13,000 researchers representing four experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Rather than pocketing the $3 million, the prize money was donated to the CERN & Society Foundation to fund doctoral student grants. This allows young researchers from around the world to spend time at the forefront of particle physics.
This structure reflects Yuri Milner’s understanding that scientific progress is rarely the work of lone geniuses. Major discoveries typically emerge from collaborative efforts spanning institutions and countries. By recognizing both individual excellence and collective achievement, the Prize honors how science actually works.
Part of a Larger Ecosystem
The Breakthrough Prize doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s one component of a broader philanthropic ecosystem that Yuri Milner has built as a Giving Pledge signatory.
The Breakthrough Initiatives fund ambitious research programs investigating fundamental questions about life in the universe. Breakthrough Listen conducts the most comprehensive search ever for extraterrestrial intelligence. Breakthrough Watch works to identify potentially habitable planets around nearby stars.
The Breakthrough Junior Challenge targets the next generation, challenging teenagers worldwide to create videos explaining complex scientific concepts. Winners receive college scholarships, their schools receive new science labs, and inspiring teachers receive cash prizes.
Together, these initiatives form a pipeline: the Junior Challenge identifies and nurtures young talent, the New Horizons Prizes support promising early-career researchers, and the main Breakthrough Prizes celebrate those whose work has achieved lasting significance.
Has It Worked?
Has it worked? The metrics suggest progress. The 2024 Junior Challenge drew participants from more than 200 countries, with winning videos reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers. Breakthrough Prize ceremonies receive media coverage that introduces scientific achievement to audiences far beyond the research community.
More importantly, the Prize has influenced how science is perceived. When researchers appear alongside celebrities, when their work receives the same production treatment as entertainment awards, the implicit message is clear: these achievements matter. They deserve attention. The people who make them deserve recognition.
As Yuri Milner writes in his Eureka Manifesto, “The Breakthrough Prize is a new concept, embedding a scientific prize in a broader cultural context: a live TV event featuring the stars of science alongside the stars of entertainment and entrepreneurship.”
In a culture that often struggles to value what it cannot see or easily understand, making science visible may be among the most important things we can do. The Breakthrough Prize is Yuri Milner’s answer to a simple question: What if we treated scientists like the heroes they are?
