breakthrough "prize"

this is a good development even though my sense is that prizes promote secrecy - and competition - and prevent true broad-based collaboration - and cooperation - which is more essential to crack humanity's grand challenges. do we really need more celebrities? we need broad based support for the sciences, especially in critical areas.

in the future, essential corporations like google and ibm should begin to evolve and morph into public utilities while connecting their profit streams to global societal costs. what we need to take aim at is the corporate life form which is sociopathic and extractive by design and transform it into a collaborative expert organism that nourishes society. in any case, the breakthrough prizes are better than nothing:

The Silicon Valley aristocrats Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner have jointly established the most lucrative annual prize in the history of science to reward research into curing diseases and extending human life.

The newly created Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation on Wednesday announces the first 11 winners of an award intended to inject excitement into the sometimes lonely, underfunded quests to understand and combat cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and other maladies.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook; Brin, who co-founded Google; and Milner, a venture capitalist, have dipped into their fortunes to sponsor awards worth $3m each, compared with a Nobel prize's monetary value of $1.1m. 

"With the mapping of the genome sequence there are expectations of significant progress in the next 10 or 20 years so I think the timing is really appropriate to create an incentive for the best scientific minds," Milner told the Guardian in an interview on the eve of the announcement.