One million euros plus three million US 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 basic researcher straight out of a textbook who, within a few weeks, was awarded two of the world's most valuable science prizes: at the beginning of September he accepted the Körber Prize for European Science, which was presented in Hamburg, and this Thursday it was announced that the sixty-year-old researcher, together with Clifford Brangwynne from Princeton University will also receive the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Science.

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 annually, have been awarded by American Silicon Valley billionaires for about ten years.

Led by Facebook CEO 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.

Hyman, a molecular biologist who was born in Israel and grew up in Great Britain, knows that they will not trigger a boom in medical applications overnight.

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 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 membrane shell, which are found in the apparently clear, form a homogeneous cell fluid and virtually 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.

The idea has grown that these dynamic condensates could lead to the development 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 also very popular at Hyman: "A large part of the work of my team concentrates 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 definitely the role model that breakthrough fellow juror Anne Wojcicki, Brin's wife and founder of the genetic data company "23andMe", imagined for the representation of the Silicon Valley mega prizes: Your announcement, 2013, in the magazine !Nature": " We want to create superheroes of science with the awards.”