China's first science prize exclusively for scientific discoveries made in China -- the Future Science Prize -- announced its first two winners on Sept. 19.

Chinese media refer to the award as "China's Nobel Prize."

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The Future Forum, a non-profit organization established last year in Beijing, announced the winners as Prof. Yuk Ming Dennis Lo, whose work led to blood tests for fetal abnormalities, and Prof. Xue QiKun who discovered an exotic behavior of electrons in materials held at very low temperatures. Each man won $1 million.

Lo, a pathologist from the Chinese University of Hong Kong won the life science Future Science Prize for the discovery that DNA from a fetus can be extracted from a mother's blood. The discovery led to the now widely used non-invasive tests to screen a pregnant woman's blood to see if the fetus has disorders such as Down's syndrome.

The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) in Shenzhen, one of the world's top genome sequencing centers, has carried out more than one million screenings based on Lo's discovery.

Qi-Kun Xue of Tsinghua University in Beijing won the physics prize for the experimental discovery of high-temperature superconductivity at the interfaces of materials, and the quantized anomalous Hall Effect.

The Hall Effect is an unusual orderly motion of electrons in a conductor at low temperature. That line of work belongs in the fast-emerging field of topological insulators.

Xue said he'll "share the money with my colleagues who made significant contribution to the two discoveries".

Lo noted he hasn't had time to think about what to do with the money. He'll start by using some of it to invite family, friends and long-time collaborators to the prize ceremony in January in Beijing.

"Everything happened so rapidly today," said Lo.

The Future Science Prize was funded by Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, and several other private industry executives.

It's awarded based on "fair and independent" selection to set it apart from government sponsored awards and grants plagued by controversy and favoritism.

The prizes will be awarded on January 15, 2017.

TagsYuk Ming Dennis Lo, Xue QiKun, Future Science Prize, China's Nobel Priz, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University