Harvard professors garnered three of this year’s 25 MacArthur “genius grants,” the MacArthur Foundation announced yesterday. Developmental biologist Kevin C. Eggan, surgeon and writer Atul A. Gawande and cosmologist Matias Zaldarriaga are among the diverse group of creative and promising fellows who will be granted $500,000 over the next five years.

The MacArthur Foundation, an independent grant-making institution, closely guards the release of its recipient list. The professors were informed last week.

“They made me swear on my children not to tell anyone but my wife,” joked Gawande, assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor in health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“I haven’t told any of my colleagues yet, maybe the guy next door got one,” said Zaldarriaga, professor of astronomy and co-creator of a computer program that can read radiation from 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

This year, Harvard is the only university to host more than a single “genius grant” honoree.

According to Gawande, the MacArthur nominators had quite a pool of Harvard academics to choose from.

“I can think of about 20 people who deserve it just from this neighborhood,” said Gawande.

The MacArthur Fellowship program has gained much prestige since its inception in 1981. Past winners include Harold Bloom, Twyla Tharp, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and former Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould.

Because the winners are chosen from nominations, not applications, the professors were taken by complete surprise.

“I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was a prank caller,” Eggan told the Associated Press (AP).

Eggan, whose stem cell cloning research is controversial among pro-life activists, said that the grant gave his work a needed boost of confidence.

“This is a field that has been much discussed. Its legitimacy, its importance have all been matters of public debate, and I think that a thoughtful nod from a group like the MacArthur Foundation sends a nod of support,” Eggan told the AP.

Eggan and his colleagues hope their research will lead to cures for diseases like juvenile diabetes and Parkinson’s.

But along with the prestige of the MacArthur fellowship comes pressure, Gawande said.

“It really is an amazing chance, but it’s also a degree of expectation,” he said. “It means that in the next five years, I have to do something better than what I’ve been doing.”

Gawande, whose second book on the risks of medicine will be released in April, said he has a rough idea of how he will leverage his $500,000 of cash.

He may take a sabbatical in order to finish a history on the scientific experimentation done on humans, which he has been working on for two and a half years.

—Staff writer Nina L. Vizcarrondo can be reached at nvizcarr@fas.harvard.edu.