Gigi Hadid & Tekedra Mawakana with Kathy High, Jean Bennett, Albert Maguire: 2026 Breakthrough Prize

Please welcome Gigi Hadid and the co-CEO of Waymo, Takedra Mawakana. I'd like to ask you all to close your eyes for a moment. Now open them. In that instant, billions of signals flooded from your retina to your brain. This cascade of chemistry and electricity somehow paints your personal picture of the world. For those of us who are lucky enough to see, we tend to take this miracle for granted. But for some children born with errors in their DNA code, that delicate cascade starts to go wrong. Gradually, day by day, their canvas darkens. The promise of gene therapy is to correct these errors hidden in the library of life. Sometimes that means fixing a single DNA letter. Other times, it means inserting a whole new page containing all the right instructions. But when our next laureates began that quest, it was just an idea, a dream, with no guarantee that it could really work to restore the ever-changing masterpiece of human vision. When Hannah was a month old, her parents took her to the doctor, worried about her sight. She has no peripheral vision. It's like she's looking at the world through two straws. That was her visual field. We'd sit out at night and watch the stars, and she couldn't see them. Decades before Hannah was born, husband-and-wife team Gene Bennett and Albert McGuire were trying to figure out how to rewrite that genetic code. If we physically isolate the normal version of that gene and put it into those affected cells, why wouldn't that correct the disease? They inserted the correct gene into the retinal cells of dogs that had been born blind. Treated with the therapy, the dogs recovered sight. By the late 90s, Katherine High at Philadelphia's Children's Hospital was convinced their therapy could work in humans. I went over to Dr. Bennett's office and asked her if we could work on this together. In 2017, after 10 years of trials, their treatment became the first approved gene replacement therapy. We wanted to prevent these people from suffering the symptoms of the disease by treating them early on. And when Hannah was 7 years old, she received the therapy. One night, I was outside, and I was able to point to the little white light in the sky. I said, that's a star. She said, I can see it. That was the first time she ever saw a star. The 7-year-old girl you just saw is now a young woman, and I'm delighted to say she is here with us tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Hannah Reif. Thank you. After my gene therapy, I realized how much of the world I'd been missing. I felt excited to see details clearly for the first time, and I was amazed when I saw a star for the very first time. As my vision improved, I felt more confident in myself, and I became brave enough to try new things like horseback riding, which quickly became something I love. I'm so grateful to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Dr. High, Dr. Bennett, and Dr. McGuire, who dedicated their careers to developing gene therapy to treat LCA. Their hard work and perseverance have given me hope for my future. Thank you so much, Hannah. And now, for developing a therapy for inherited retinal degeneration that became the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a genetic disease. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences goes to Jean Bennett, Katherine High, and Albert McGuire. We started with an untreatable and curable disease. After witnessing blind puppies develop vision after treatment, it became a moral imperative to bring gene therapy to blind people. I witnessed its immeasurable value, a blind mother seeing her child's face for the very first time, children discarding their blind canes to ride bikes, play sports, and read, young adults going to social events, cultivating careers, and witnessing such transformations. It motivates my efforts to develop gene therapy for other crippling diseases. I don't think I ever expected to be at an event like this. When my wife, Jean, and I first talked about doing this project, we were dating and I thought I was just making clever conversation. Little did I know she was taking me seriously. And four decades later, here we are. Years ago at this ceremony, one of the awardees asked, science, where would we be without it? To which I would reply, without romance, there'd be no science. Well, on a more serious note, one of the hopes of the Human Genome Project was that the complete sequencing of the genome would allow us to develop new treatments for a whole range of serious inherited diseases. Human gene therapy has turned that promise into reality. And we now have treatments for serious diseases, including this form of blindness, sickle cell disease, and previously fatal pediatric diseases like spinal muscular atrophy. Each of these novel treatments have dramatically altered the lives of people born with these conditions. But there are many more diseases to treat.