A prestigious prize awarded by Tel Aviv University in Israel has a new name. The Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, named after two members of a family now notorious for its role in the U.S. opioid epidemic, is now the Tel Aviv University International Prize in Biophysics.
The university and the Sackler family “mutually decided to remove the Sackler name from the university’s awards,” the university said in a statement to Science. References to the Sackler family have already been removed from the award’s website, and three winners announced earlier this year received an email this week confirming the name change.
In early May, Tel Aviv University announced this year’s prize would go to biophysicists Petra Schwille of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Cees Dekker of the Delft University of Technology, and Leonid Mirny of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The laureates, who will also share a $50,000 monetary award, said they were initially grateful and excited but later told Science they were uncomfortable about the link to the Sackler family and spoke out in favor of changing the name.
The Sacklers and their company, Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed highly addictive opioids such as OxyContin and pushed for their use not just in terminally ill cancer patients, but also for a range of milder and chronic complaints. The company downplayed the drugs’ dangers and allegedly encouraged doctors to overprescribe them.
Critics have accused the family of using its philanthropy to whitewash its business practices, and museums such as the Louvre in Paris and the National Portrait Gallery in London have disassociated themselves from the family. Tufts University, the University of Oxford, and Leiden University have all removed the Sackler name from libraries, programs, and galleries.
Tel Aviv University, which historically had close ties to the Sackler family, took the Sackler name off its medical school for U.S. and Canadian students in 2022 and its medical faculty in 2023. Prior to its new renaming decision, the university also awarded the Beverly Sackler International Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, launched in 2000.
The three laureates were notified this week that the award ceremony will take place in May 2025. It was originally scheduled for this month but was postponed because of the security situation in Israel, Dekker says. The governments of the Netherlands and Germany, where Dekker and Schwille reside, currently advise against any travel to Israel. The U.S. Department of State’s advice is to “reconsider traveling to Israel.”
Dekker calls the change “good news” and says he hopes to be able to attend the ceremony next year. “It is still a prestigious prize for groundbreaking work in our field,” he says.
