Context: The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to 13,508 physicists across four collaborative projects at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

Meaning of the context: The award was announced on April 5th as part of the 11th annual Breakthrough Prizes. Six prizes worth $3 million each were announced in Life Sciences, Mathematics and Fundamental Physics.

Learn More:

• The Breakthrough Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in science, often referred to as the “Oscars of Science”. 
• The awards were established in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, former Google chief Sergey Brin, genomics company 23&Me founder Anne Wojcicki, and tech investor couple Yuri and Julia Milner to recognize groundbreaking achievements in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics.

Breakthrough Prize In Life Sciences – The award in this category was given to three groups of scientists:

• Weight-loss drugs : Five scientists — Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, and Svetlana Mojsov — were awarded a prize for discovering and characterizing the GLP-1 hormone, which led to the development of weight loss and diabetes drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.
• Multiple Sclerosis treatment : Multiple Sclerosis is an unpredictable chronic disease caused by the immune system attacking the protective sheath that covers nerve fibres of the central nervous system. Alberto Ascherio and Stephen L. Hauser were awarded the Prize for identifying the role of the B-cells of the immune system in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and devising treatments targeted at the same. 
• Gene-editing technologies : David R Liu was awarded the Prize for developing the base editing and prime editing technologies widely used to edit the DNA of living organisms. These are significant as they can edit the DNA without cutting its double helix, and rewrite entire stretches of defective DNA with a corrected version.

Breakthrough Prize In Fundamental Physics

• The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to four collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.
• The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing protons to accelerate and collide, thus helping scientists study the properties of matter. The four collaborations studied the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God Particle’, is known to impart mass to every other particle.

Source : Indian Express