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UT Southwestern researcher earns star status with $3 million Breakthrough Prize 

The prizes are among the biggest payouts in science and are backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

Lights. Camera. Science.

In a scene out of Hollywood, researchers and celebrities will gather in an ornately choreographed fête in a NASA Ames hangar in early November to celebrate $22 million in prizes for discoveries in math, physics and the life sciences.

And a UT Southwestern biochemist will be among the honorees as top thinkers in their fields. Dr. Zhijian "James" Chen was announced Wednesday as a Breakthrough Prize winner for his discovery of how DNA triggers immune and autoimmune responses from the interior of a cell.

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Chen's 2012 discovery is described as solving a century-old medical mystery. In 1908, a Nobel Laureate noted in his acceptance speech that surgeons in Europe treated patients with DNA to boost their patients' defense against infections. Chen's biochemical investigations revealed the pathway underlying that response, according to UT Southwestern.

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Other discoveries include high-resolution imaging technologies, a new class of drugs, chromosomal disease, innovations in cryptography and a new type of electrical-conducting materials.

The prizes are among the biggest payouts in science, with each winner receiving $3 million. Conceived by theoretical physicist and entrepreneur Yuri Milner, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation aims to create a cultural shift -- if scientists are toasted like celebrities, they'll win greater public attention.

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Brainiacs will be celebrated in a self-consciously glittery, grand and prestigious event, hosted by actor Pierce Brosnan, where they'll rub shoulders with movie stars and tech titans. In previous years, guests included actors Morgan Freeman, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, as well as Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Elk, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrum and Virgin Galactic's George Whitesides.

Since the inception of the Breakthrough Prize in 2012, more than $200 million has been awarded to honor critical research.

The prize is funded by Milner and his wife, Julia, Chinese entrepreneur Ma Huateng and several Silicon Valley tech titans: Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe; Sergey Brin of Google and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician at UC San Francisco.

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Winners in life sciences, besides Chen:

  • C. Frank Bennett and Adrian R. Krainer of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, respectively, for the development of a therapy for children with the neurodegenerative disease spinal muscular atrophy, a rare but devastating disease.
  • Angelika Amon of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute for determining the consequences of an abnormal chromosome number, a disorder called aneuploidy.
  • Xiaowei Zhuang of Harvard University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who discovered hidden structures in cells by developing super-resolution imaging -- a method that transcends the limits of light microscopy.

Winner in fundamental physics:

  • Charles Kane and Eugene Mele of the University of Pennsylvania for new ideas about topology and symmetry in physics, leading to the prediction of a new class of materials that conduct electricity only on their surface.

Winner in math:

  • Vincent Lafforgue of Europe's National Center for Scientific Research and IInstitut Fourier, Universite Grenoble Alpes, for ground-breaking contributions to several areas of mathematics, in particular to the Langlands program in the function field case.

In addition, there were six smaller prizes of $100,000 each for early-career researchers in physics and math.

Last month, the foundation announced a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognizing British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell for her discovery of pulsars -- a detection first announced in February 1968 -- and her scientific leadership over the last five decades. She donated her $3 million prize money to efforts that help women, ethnic minority, and refugee students study physics.

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The winners are chosen by a committee of the previous year's winners. This year's ceremony will be broadcast live at 7 p.m. Nov. 4 on National Geographic, and will be streamed live via Facebook and YouTube on National Geographic TV and Breakthrough Prize.

Lisa M. Krieger, The Mercury News (TNS). Dallas Morning News research also was included in this story.