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Science solutions in SA

Experts in everything from sardines to bones, nuclear reactions to throat cancer walked away with new awards at the sixth annual National Science and Technology Forum awards in Kempton Park.

UCT zoology lecturer Coleen Moloney spends her days crunching data in a computer but her mind is always on the ocean. Coleen, whose unusual name is the result of a father who couldn't spell, develops ground-breaking computer models which predict how fishing changes the balance of the oceans from year to year, affecting everything from minute marine bacteria to teens eating hake and chips.

"This is a new approach to managing fish stocks around the globe, it's a major shift in the way business is done and South Africa is quite close to the forefront of the field," says Moloney, who won the first ever R100,000 research grant, sponsored by the electricity giant Eskom, for women academics who have been instrumental in nurturing a more diverse crop of much-needed scientists in South Africa's first decade of democracy.

The male counterpart to Moloney's Eskom award was won by nuclear physics professor Krish Bharuth-Ram of the newly-created University of KwaZulu-Natal, who circumvented apartheid-era restrictions on equipment by taking his students on extended field trips to labs across the country. Bharuth-Ram was a victim of apartheid himself, denied entry to the then whites-only University of Natal for many years, having a hyphen inserted in his surname by a rather colonial registrar at Fort Hare and forced to teach at Durban-Westville because of his Indian ancestry. But regardless of the state's policies on skin colour, the Oxford-trained Phd said he always made sure his students understood that their brains were world-class.

A lump in the throat is something that worries the male winner of another new R50,000 award, this time sponsored by the National Research Foundation to highlight work done by senior black scientists in the last decade. UCT professor Mohamed Iqbal Parker and his team fight cancer of the oesophagus, the tube connecting the mouth and the stomach. Although not very high-profile, it kills more South Africans than skin cancer. Often the first sign that something's wrong - an inability to swallow - is also a sign that it's too late to do anything.

"Survival time is about five months by the time they get to a doctor," says this father of two doctors-in-training. Black males, especially those in the former Transkei and KwaZulu-Natal, are particularly vulnerable, apparently due to vomiting used in traditional cleansing practices and the use of certain herbs. The good news is that Parker and others have designed an inexpensive R15 early-warning system on a string which can be swallowed and easily removed. The bad news is that health services are already under attack by HIV and TB, and will battle to find staff and money to take advantage of his discoveries.

The female version of the same award went to UCT dinosaur detective Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan. The professor throws the bones in ways that would not be recognised by any sangoma: using a diamond-edged cutting wheel, she carefully slices off paper-thin fragments of fossilised bones and studies their microstructure to solve longstanding debates such as how long it took dinosaurs to reach adulthood. Her verdict: three decades, or longer than humans, for some of the veggie-eating giants lumbering through local swamps in what eventually became the Karoo. The mother of two's reasons for working: "dinosaurs were around for a lot longer than we have been. We can learn a lot about our own evolution from them."

Meanwhile, the country’s first African female Phd in mathematics education, Wits’ Dr Mamokgethi Setati, is still breaking new ground. The glamorous mother of one won the first-ever R50,000 research grant for the best junior black researcher for her efforts to improve the teaching and learning of numbers in a multilingual classroom, and is founder of the National Association for Mathematics Educators in South Africa.

Dr Setati practices what she preaches. She has erected a white-board in her lounge, next to the tv, and puts a new math problem on it every week. “My thirteen-year-old son gets an award if he solves the problem within two or three days – computer games, Playstation, cartoons, that sort of thing. If he doesn’t, well, everything in my house is run on points,” she says.

And another Wits academic won the last new award, for up-and-coming black male scientists, Dr Tshilidzi Marwala. The information engineer from the Limpopo is interested in creating intelligent computers, utilising fuzzy logic and neural networks, which can be used to do everything from build safer bridges to predict outbreaks of epilepsy in individuals and conflict in countries.

More information:

A full list of winners will be available at www.nstf.org.za

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