Together, they make up the X-Prize Foundation, an organisation set up by Peter Diamandis of Space Adventures, the company that arranged for Dennis Tito to fly to the International Space Station in 2001 and so become the world's first space tourist. The foundation (motto: 'Creating radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity'), plans to launch three prizes of at least $10 million this year to crack some of the toughest problems facing genetics, nanotechnology and the car industry. 'Our goal is to build ourselves into a world-class prize institute and focus on using those prizes to attack some of the grand challenges of our time,' Dr Diamandis said. 'By setting up prizes with a big enough purse, you can reach across space and time and problems will get solved.'

The move follows the foundation's huge success with the Ansari X-Prize, which promised $I0 million for the first commercial manned spacecraft to reach suborbital space twice within two weeks. Named after Anousheh Ansari, a dotcom multimillionaire and one of only two women on the foundation's board, the prize attracted 26 teams which spent more than $100 million trying to win. The prize was triggered by what Dr Diamandis calls his 'absolute frustration at the glacial pace of progress' and was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan, an American aeronautics expert, with his rocket-plane SpaceShipOne. The competition forced US officials to draw up regulations for commercial spaceflight and paved the way for Richard Branson to add space tourism to his portfolio with the launch of Virgin Galactic, a spaceflight venture that will use a rocket designed by Mr Rutan.

Now the foundation is looking to repeat its success in other areas of science. Dr Diamandis is cagey about the finer details of future prizes, but one will offer $10 million for the first company to sequence the genetic code of 100 people in a matter of weeks. The prize is intended to force private industry to find ways of making full genome sequencing cheap enough for everyone to afford. It will be no cakewalk: a full genome sequence now takes around six months to read and costs $20 million. 'The value of having the human genome doesn't really occur until you have it for tens or hundreds of thousands of people, so the prize will make that happen,' Dr Diamandis said. 'To say this gene correlates with adult onset diabetes, that this gene reacts badly with that drug, you need a huge statistical database.'

A second prize is aimed at kicking America's self-proclaimed addiction to oil, by spurring research into greener vehicles. 'This is a hot button that can effect our reliance on energy from around the world and our production of pollution, which are major problems from a national security standpoint and an environmental standpoint,' Dr Diamandis said. 'We're still using the internal combustion engine after 100 years, and getting 20 miles per gallon for the past 40 years. It's ripe for a major prize to break things open.' The foundation is also planning prizes in nanotechnology and education and is considering a second space prize, which could see the first commercial team to put a person into orbital spaceflight win $50 million to $100 million. 'We're always looking for where things have become stuck, where there are bureaucratic, technology, government or industrial problems stopping things evolving.' According to