Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Longitude Prize 2014

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Reward(s)
  
£10 million

Official website
  
www.longitudeprize.org

Sponsored by
  
NESTA Technology Strategy Board BBC

The Longitude Prize 2014 is an inducement prize contest offered by Nesta, a British lottery funded charity, in the spirit of the 18th-century Longitude prize.

Contents

The prize was announced by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, in 2012, and a shortlist of six challenges to be put to a public vote was announced at Broadcasting House in May 2014.

It was announced on 25 June 2014 that the prize will be awarded for antibiotics.

Candidate challenges

The six challenges as selected by a committee are:

  • Flight - How can we fly without damaging the environment?
  • Food - How can we ensure everyone has nutritious sustainable food?
  • Antibiotics - How can we prevent the rise of resistance to antibiotics?
  • Paralysis - How can we restore movement to those with paralysis?
  • Water - How can we ensure everyone has access to safe and clean water?
  • Dementia - How can we help people with dementia live independently for longer?

    • Longitude Committee

    A committee, chaired by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, chose the six challenges that will be put to a public vote. The committee members are:

    Public vote

    The British public chose the focus of the prize from the shortlisted six choices. The prize was a focus of an episode of the BBC science programme Horizon. The result was announced on the The One Show on BBC 1 on 25 June. and the winner was antibiotics. The Longitude Committee will decide the subsequent format of the prize and the specific challenges that must be met to win.

    The competition website explains that the challenge for the Longitude Prize will be "to create a cheap, accurate, rapid and easy-to-use point of care test kit for bacterial infections." The committee issued a draft of the criteria with a two-week opportunity for open review, which finished 10 August 2014.

    The vote was urged and welcomed by the Catherine Ball of the Biochemical Society:

    "This is an issue which must be urgently addressed...what is really scary is that the threat of AMR (Antimicrobial resistance) is insidiously building; unless we act now it will creep up on the world and influence practically every area of modern medicine...To me, antibiotic resistance is the obvious choice for the Longitude Prize; indeed, without antibiotics many of the discoveries in the other challenge areas could be rendered useless."

    It was also welcomed by Jamie Reed, Shadow Minister for Health and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Antibiotics, who said "The scale of the challenge that antimicrobial resistance presents is beyond any doubt and new innovative thinking is essential."

    References

    Longitude Prize 2014 Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA