At Gala Held By Tech’s Billionaires, Breakthrough Prize Winners Deride ‘Fake News’ And ‘Anti-Intellectualism’

Some of the top scientists who accepted Breakthrough Prize awards for their work in physics and biology used the nationally broadcast ceremony to decry the spread of misinformation, problems that continue to dog the tech giants whose leaders, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, celebrated at the glitzy Silicon Valley gala. 

“Science is a rock of truth in a sea of fake news,” said physicist Peter Van Nieuwenhuizen, who with collaborators Sergio Ferrara and Daniel Freedman accepted an award Sunday evening for their work towards the theory of supergravity. 

David Julius, a University of California, San Francisco physiology professor who won a $3 million award for research into capsaicin found in chili peppers and pain relief, noted “we live in a time when technology and so many other resources make so much possible.”

“And yet paradoxically we seem to be facing a trend toward anti-intellectualism, factory decision-making and superstition,” he said.

Cofounded by billionaire Yuri Milner and his wife Julia Milner in 2012 to draw Oscars-type acclaim and excitement for scientific achievements, the foundation and annual Breakthrough Prize event have become a way for a cluster of tech billionaires — many with ties to Google and Facebook — to channel their wealth into research that sometimes dovetails with their personal interests.

Milner, an early backer of Facebook and Twitter through his venture fund DST Global, and an investor in Spotify and Airbnb, has funded a $100 million project to find extraterrestrial life. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, a sponsor of the prize, has reportedly experimented with building blimps for humanitarian missions. Sponsors Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, in 2015 pledged most of their then- $45 billion Facebook fortune to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which focuses on health, education and alleviating poverty. 

“I believe science and technology and the imagination behind them can help us solve a lot of our problems, including can help us cure, prevent and manage all human diseases within our children’s life times,” Zuckerberg told the audience of roughly 400. “But for that to happen, we have to invest in science.”

The televised gala, broadcast on the National Geographic channel as well as YouTube and China’s Tencent, whose founder Ma Huateng is also a sponsor, played heavily on a theme that’s become somewhat tarnished in Silicon Valley in recent years — that scientific and technological progress will solve humanity’s biggest problems. For the past two years, Facebook and Google have both been battered by lawmakers and the public for how they’ve failed to eliminate the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories (sometimes about science) and content that connects violent extremists. Both Zuckerberg and Pichai have also countered rising complaints from the tech giants’ workforces.  

While some of those issues were making headlines as recently as last week, the ceremony to grant $21 million in awards mostly acted as a respite from the daily headache of running giant advertising-supported platforms. Held in a specially built vaulted glass structure at NASA’s Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, next to a 1930s hangar for blimps, the ceremony paired Breakthrough backers Anne Wojcicki, CEO of DNA testing company 23andme (and Brin’s ex-wife) with Hollywood talent such as Drew Barrymore and Empire’s Taraji Henson. Late-night talk-show host James Corden emceed and Lenny Kravitz — with a gospel choir as backup — performed. 

Among the attendees were David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s embattled Libra cryptocurrency project and Susan Wojcicki, CEO of Google-owned YouTube. She posed with sisters Anne and Janet and mother Esther on the event’s red carpet. 

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla attended the dinner, as did Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman and ex-DFJ partner Steve Jurvetson, along with  philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, ex-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Wendi Murdoch, an investor and former wife of News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch. 

For the scientists accepting the awards, which were announced in September, the event was recognition for their team’s work, some of which stretched back decades  — and a hopeful sign that science will prevail against rising forces such as nationalism. 

“There are lot of things that divide us as humans — there are borders, politics, even conflicts,” Sheperd Doeleman, whose Event Horizon team won a $3 million award for capturing the first image of a black hole, told reporters before the event. A team of 347 from 20 countries collaborated to to capture the far-away image. “We did it by using resources from around the globe,” said Doeleman. “That only happens because we get around everything that could divide us.”