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The Breakthrough Prize, whose co-founders include Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Yuri Milner, is kind of like the “Oscars of science” in that they’re glitzy, televised, and crawling with Hollywood celebrities. The most recent prize ceremony, for instance, featured appearances by Mr Beast, Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow, and Katy Perry, among numerous others, none of whom do much to immediately bring my mind to, y’know, thoughts of science.
That also holds true for Seth Rogen, who took the stage with Edward Norton to present the special prize in fundamental physics to Dutch theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft. But apparently Rogen’s a little more up to speed about what’s going on out there than I gave him credit for, because as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, he used the opportunity to draw attention to the Trump administration’s ruthless dismantling of scientific endeavors, with the support of ultra-wealthy benefactors.
Following an introduction by host James Corden, the presentation began with Norton offering praise to some of the tech billionaires in the audience, which included Brin, Zuckerberg, and Milner. Then Rogen jumped in.
“And it’s amazing that others in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science,” Rogen said, a clear shot at the many tech billionaires who rushed to pledge fealty to US president Donald Trump immediately after his election or donated to his campaign.
“It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast,” Rogen continued, directly targeting Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the Secretary of Health and Human Services who thinks vaccines cause autism and measles is no big deal, and Elon Musk, who famously poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump election campaign. (Purely speculatively, that may also be a typo: Musk had a reported net worth of $320 billion in March 2025, although it’s gone up since then because of course it has. He spent “at least $288 million” backing Trump’s campaign, according to The Washington Post.)
The bit didn’t land super well with the audience and made Norton “visibly uncomfortable,” according to the report, but that’s what happens when you speak truth to power. It was also completely absent when the ceremony was posted to YouTube: Rogen’s joke was cut out entirely.
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation told THR that the edit, along with “several” others, was made “in order to meet the originally planned run time,” and sure, that happens for broadcast, but for YouTube? And the edit is so smooth and perfectly placed, you wouldn’t even know it was made.
Can you tell?
According to THR—which, for the record, is a media sponsor of the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony—Rogen dropped his bombs just prior to Norton’s “light applause” comment near the start of the video, which was actually a reference to the audience’s iffy reaction to the jokes and not their appearance on stage. Another joke a little later in the presentation, in which Rogen talks about a wheel that can roll left or right and then says the crowd would “roll right,” was also cut from both the full video and the excerpt above—and again, with a precision that makes its absence entirely unnoticeable, as if it was never in the picture in the first place.
Rogen’s criticism of the tech industry isn’t the only thing to be cut: A “lewd” joke Corden made about Judi Dench and Dr. Anthony Fauci was also reportedly snipped, and so it may well be that the Breakthrough Prize people simply cut every uncomfortable joke, and not just the ones most likely to upset the wealthy and powerful.
Regardless of the motivation, another scientific principle has now taken hold: the Streisand Effect. Despite the infusion of Hollywood, the Breakthrough Prize ceremony is relatively unknown, but Rogen’s jokes—and the fact that they were edited out—have drawn widespread attention on social media and news outlets. They also drew support from at least one former Breakthrough Prize winner, Tom Radcliffe, who said on Bluesky that Rogen “did the right thing, to disturb the comfortable.”
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Kurt Indovina
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