Lemelson–MIT Prize

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lemelson-MIT Prize carries a $500,000 purse, the largest cash prize for invention in the United States. Jerome H. Lemelson endowed it in 1994, and the Lemelson Foundation has funded it ever since. MIT's School of Engineering administers the award.

  What does $500,000 buy in recognition? The prize's winner list stretches from computer hardware pioneers to biomedical chemists to nanotechnology researchers. Every year, the program asks which invention changed things enough to matter.

  A student prize for graduate inventors also began in 1995, alongside a companion Lifetime Achievement Award. The inaugural Lifetime Achievement honor that year went jointly to William Hewlett and David Packard, the pair who built Hewlett-Packard together.

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• 2. Circuits and Control

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  Douglas Engelbart received the prize in 1997. His citation named him a computer and Internet pioneer and recognized him specifically for inventing the computer mouse. Few inventions from the twentieth century moved into the daily lives of ordinary people as completely as that small pointing device did.

  Dean Kamen took the 2002 prize for two inventions: the Segway personal transport device and an infusion pump for diabetics. The pairing is unusual. One addressed how people moved through space; the other helped manage a chronic illness. The prize treated both as equally worthy of recognition.

  James Fergason's 2006 prize came for his liquid crystal display innovations. Liquid crystal displays now power the flat screens common in phones, computers, and televisions. The 2007 prize went to Timothy M. Swager.

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• 3. Biology and Medicine

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  Stanley Norman Cohen and Herbert Boyer shared the 1996 prize as co-recipients. The award recognized their development of methods to combine and transplant genes. Gene splicing of that kind eventually became central to biological and medical research.

  Leroy Hood received the 2003 prize for his invention of four devices designed to help unlock the human genome, including the automated DNA sequencer. The sequencer allowed researchers to read genetic information far more rapidly than earlier methods permitted. Hood's four inventions together formed a toolkit for decoding the biological blueprint of living things.

  Chad Mirkin won in 2009. His program profile listed professorships in chemistry, medicine, materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering, and chemical and biological engineering, all at Northwestern University. He also directed the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly there.

  Stephen Quake, who took the 2012 prize, held concurrent roles as scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and professor of biophysics and genomics at Stanford University.

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• 4. A Lifetime of Achievement

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  Wilson Greatbatch won the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award for developing batteries for the early implantable cardiac pacemaker. Without a reliable internal power source, a pacemaker could not sustain itself inside the body. Greatbatch's work solved that problem.

  Gertrude Elion's 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award recognized six separate pharmaceutical inventions. 6-mercaptopurine was the first treatment for leukemia. Azathioprine was the first immunosuppressive agent, used to make organ transplants viable. Allopurinol treated gout; pyrimethamine, malaria; trimethoprim, meningitis, sepsis, and bacterial infections; and acyclovir, herpes simplex virus infection. No other Lifetime Achievement honoree came with a list of this length.

  Jacob Rabinow received the 1998 award. His work produced the first disc-shaped magnetic storage media for computers and the magnetic particle clutch. He also invented the first straight-line phonograph and the first self-regulating clock. His reading machine was the first device to use the best match principle.

  Stephanie Kwolek took the 1999 award for her work on liquid-crystalline polymers and the development of the armored fabric Kevlar. Al Gross won in 2000 for four communication devices: the first walkie-talkie, the CB radio, the telephone pager, and the cordless telephone. Raymond Damadian received the 2001 award for his work in magnetic resonance imaging.

  The Lifetime Achievement Award closed with Sidney Pestka in 2006. The program replaced it with the Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation, previously called the Award for Sustainability, which also carried $100,000. That award was last presented in 2013, when Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden shared it.

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• 5. The Next Generation

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  Thomas Massie won the first Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. For nearly twenty years after that inaugural award, a single winner claimed the student prize each year.

  By 2014, the competition had split into themed categories. Cure It!, Use It!, Eat It!, Drive It!, and Move It! all eventually appeared in its award cycle.

  By 2021, the program also offered undergraduate prizes alongside the graduate awards. The Cure It! undergraduate prize that year went to a three-person team: Bruce Enzmann, Michael Lan, and Anson Zhou. The Move It! undergraduate prize went to Maya Burhanpurkar and Seung Hwan An. The Eat It! graduate prize that year went to Hilary Johnson.

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