One million euros plus three million dollars in prize money on top of that, that's what you call a successful month of research.

Anthony Hyman from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden is the lucky recipient, a textbook basic researcher who was awarded two of the world's most valuable scientific awards within just a few weeks: at the beginning of September he accepted the Körber, which was awarded in Hamburg Prize for European Science, and this Thursday it was announced that the 60-year-old researcher will also receive the "Breakthrough Prize 2023 in Life Science" together with Clifford Brangwynne from Princeton University.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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The Breakthrough Awards, of which there are several with a total endowment of 15 million dollars a year, have been awarded by American Silicon Valley billionaires for about ten years, led by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and internet mogul Yuri Milner .

The recognition of Hyman and Brangwynne in Silicon Valley is remarkable because their discovery of a completely new process within cells that leads to the organization of proteins and RNA - from so-called "condensates" - in the aqueous cell fluid was previously considered pure basic research .

It is still completely open whether the findings will lead to the hoped-for therapy of destructive brain disorders, for example.

In any case, they will not trigger an application boom in medicine overnight,

Hyman, a molecular biologist who was born in Israel and grew up in Great Britain, knows this too.

He began his work in cell research in the late 1980s, back then in the laboratory of the highly respected Nobel Prize winner and pioneer of molecular biology Sydney Brenner at the University of Cambridge.

He went to the University of California as a postdoc and shortly thereafter took over his own laboratory at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, where he mainly dealt with cell division.

In 1999 he was one of four founding members of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden.

Here - more precisely: during a student course on the US peninsula of Cape Cod - he also made the groundbreaking discoveries that led him and Brangwynne to the ominous "condensates" of RNA and proteins - molecular aggregates without any H-membrane shell, which are found in the apparently clear, form a homogeneous cell liquid and wash around all other cell organelles such as the cell nucleus or the mitochondria as cell power plants.

They later called the tiny molecule “droplets” “P-Granula” in their first publication.

Biochemical reactions take place inside these condensates that would hardly be possible outside.

Thus, the idea has increasingly grown that these dynamic condensates could result in the emergence of age-related diseases.

In fact, toxic substances can accumulate in the cells in this way.

For this reason, degenerative brain diseases in particular are very popular at Hyman: "A large part of the work of my team focuses on the application of methods of physical chemistry," he said recently when the Körber Prize was awarded, "we want to understand how cellular processes fail in diseases".

A researcher with visions.

In this respect, Hyman is quite the role model that Breakthrough fellow judge Anne Wojcicki, Brin's wife and founders of the genetic data company "23andMe",