Blackburn picks up accolades and tidy sum

Australian-born scientist Elizabeth Blackburn has received the L'Oreal UNESCO award for women in science.

Blackburn, who was born in Tasmania but has long worked at the University of California, San Francisco, won the North American section of the award for her discovery of telomerase and her work on the role of telomeres in cancer and ageing.

She was accompanied at the ceremony in Paris yesterday by three previous Australasian winners of the award: Professor Suzanne Cory from WEHI, Professor Jenny Graves from ANU and Professor Margaret Brimble from the University of Auckland, who won last year's award for the Asia-Pacific region.

The award, now in its tenth year, comes with a US$100,000 cheque.

The other 2008 winner are:

Asia-Pacific: Professor V. Narry Kim of the Seoul National University, who described the stepwise processing method by which microRNAs are generated, and who identified how the nucleic enzyme Drosha recognises cleavage sites.

Europe: Professor Ada Yonath from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, a pioneer of ribosome crystallography, for her structural studies of the protein biosynthesis system and its disruption by antibiotics.

South America: Professor Ana Belen Elgoyhen of the University of Buenos Aires, an auditory physiologist, for her contributions to the understanding of the molecular basis of hearing.

Africa and the Arab States: Professor Lidadh Al-Gazali, from the United Arab Emirates University but originally from Iraq, a clinical geneticist who established the UAE's first clinical genetics service and specialises in the characterisation of inherited disorders.

L'Oreal is now planning its second year of Australian Fellowships, involving four $20,000 scholarships for early career Australian women scientists. Applications for the 2008 Fellowships will open in May.