The 'prophecy' of the VinFuture Prize

According to Professor Dang Van Chi - Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (USA) - winning the VinFuture Prize will have a greater chance of winning the Nobel Prize.

After only four seasons, the VinFuture Prize has quickly become a meeting place for the world's leading intellectuals. The fact that many VinFuture winners have subsequently been named at the Nobel Prize is a clear testament to the growing prestige and appeal of the first international science and technology prize initiated by Vietnamese people.

Outstanding minds create the VinFuture - Nobel "double"

In the first season (2021), when the world was struggling to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, VinFuture chose to honor a group of three pioneering scientists who developed mRNA technology - the platform that helps create vaccines to save billions of lives.

Three scientists (from left to right) Pieter Rutter Cullis, Drew Weissman, Katalin Kariko at the first VinFuture Prize ceremony.

Two years later, Dr. Katalin Kariko and Professor Drew Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for this work - a turning point considered a "game-changer" for modern medicine, turning mRNA from a risky idea into the foundation for a new generation of vaccines and treatments.

Also in the first season, VinFuture awarded the special prize "Scientist researching new fields" to Professor Omar M. Yaghi (University of California, Berkeley) for his research on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). In 2025, he continued to be honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two other scientists, also for his work on MOFs.

In the second VinFuture season (2022), the special prize for "Scientists researching new fields" went to Dr. Demis Hassabis and Dr. John Jumper with the AI ​​system AlphaFold. Two years later, AlphaFold 2 received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

AlphaFold 2 helps shorten the processing time from several years to just a few days, even a few minutes, speeding up the process of solving important problems in life. The work also provides a database of structures of more than 200 million proteins as a research resource for thousands of other scientists around the world .

Another special case is Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton (University of Toronto) - who simultaneously received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and the main VinFuture Prize 2024 for his fundamental research on artificial neural networks, helping to develop deep learning algorithms. He was announced to receive the Nobel Prize on October 8, and just two months later, on December 6, continued to be honored at the VinFuture Prize ceremony in Hanoi.

Winning VinFuture will have a greater chance of winning the Nobel

Professor Dang Van Chi - Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (USA), member of the VinFuture Prize Council, said that in the early days of its establishment (2021), VinFuture was quite new so it was little known.

However, after 5 years, all major universities in the world sent many quality nominations and the winners all had outstanding works.

Professor Dang Van Chi.

" Some scientists later won the Nobel Prize. That shows we chose the right people. The five people we chose to award the VinFuture Prize later received the Nobel Prize. So I think whoever wins the VinFuture Prize will have a higher chance of winning the Nobel Prize ," said Mr. Chi.

According to Professor Chi, VinFuture includes the main prize and special prizes, the winners of which are people whose research projects have a huge impact on the population. Because the message of the VinFuture prize is that science and technology serve humanity and it is completely different from other prizes in the world.

" We will all realize that this is an extremely important award and it creates excitement in the world community. Because the VinFuture Award expresses a profound, humane message: doing science is not just for the sake of doing science, but doing science is to serve humanity, bringing impact to millions of people," Mr. Chi expressed .

Sharing about the orientation of the VinFuture Prize for the next years, Professor Chi affirmed that the prize council is always looking for what will happen in the future, what will make a difference to award the prize.

" The awards we give each year are very different from other awards because VinFuture has a different mission. I cannot reveal which fields at the moment, but maybe, if you think about which technologies have an impact on millions of people, that is our answer ," said Professor Dang Van Chi.

Mr. Chi added, it could be technology that provides more food for the world or clean air, clean oceans… with the impact on millions of lives. And these are areas that most awards do not consider carefully.

VinFuture Foundation is a non-profit organization co-founded on December 20, 2020 - International Day of Human Solidarity - by Mr. Pham Nhat Vuong, founder of Vingroup, and his wife - Mrs. Pham Thu Huong.

The Foundation's core activity is to award the annual VinFuture Prize for groundbreaking scientific research and technological innovations that have the potential to create meaningful change in people's lives.

The VinFuture Prize consists of four categories, including the main prize worth 3 million USD - one of the largest prizes in the world; and three special prizes worth 500,000 USD each for female scientists, scientists from developing countries and scientists researching new fields.

Source: https://vtcnews.vn/su-tien-tri-cua-giai-thuong-vinfuture-ar990534.html