John Shine, director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney has won the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.
Credit: Bearcage productions
SYDNEY: For discovering the five letters that would jump-start the biotech revolution, the director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney has won the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.
Three of Australia's top scientists and two teachers are to receive awards this evening at a black tie event at Parliament House in Canberra.
The recipients will medals, pins and cash prizes as large as $300,000 for promoting and furthering Australian science both on the world stage and at home. Every year the recipients are chosen from among hundreds of nominations by a select group of referees and judges following strict criteria.
Five letters to fame
John Shine, director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, took out the top award, the Prime Minister's Prize for Science, highlighting an illustrious career in biotechnology and medical research.
Discovering the Shine-Dalgarno sequence in DNA - the five letters GGAGG, which he discovered during his doctorate - was only the beginning of the discoveries that have filled Shine's career. After discovering the sequence, which controls the production of proteins from DNA, he became the first person to clone a human hormone gene, cloning the human insulin gene and inserting it into a bacterial cell. This was an important step in jump-starting the biotechnology revolution and growing the Garvan Institute into a world leader in medical research.
"In the future any new drugs will be based on biotechnology approaches [with] biopharmaceuticals produced from small bacterial factories," said Shine.
The 'Mother fish'
The Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year has been awarded to palaeontologist and geologist Katherine Trinajstic of Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. The award celebrates the work of a scientist in at the beginning of his or her career, within 10 years of completing their doctorate, for work in the field of physical science.
Finding the 'Mother fish' in the Gogo reef site in the Kimberly Ranges has been the highlight of her young career. The fossil fish is 380 million years old, with an umbilical cord and embryonic baby - the discovery pushed back the evolution of live bearing animals by 200 million years.
Now she's helping Chevron energy to develop methods for evaluating fossil fuel deposits and searching for more biomolecules - ancient samples of muscle and soft tissue - in her Gogo reef fossils.
