Article

SA science gets a makeover

Ten years after democracy, the new face of South African science was visible as the National Science and Technology Forum awarded four new valuable prizes for black researchers.

One of the winners in the junior research category was Dr Mamokgethi Setati of Wits University, the first African woman to get a Phd in mathematics education. Another finalist was mathematics professor Mark Petersen of the University of the Northwest's Potchefstroom campus

Winning the male version of the same category for up-and-coming black scientists is Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, from the school of electrical and information engineering at Wits, who uses mathematics - and quite a few other things as well, including some theories designed by an avant-guard English clergyman a few hundred years ago - to work on creating intelligent computers. He was up against, among others, Dr Gareth Witten, a young biomathematician from the University of Cape Town who uses his skills to model what the AIDS virus does to the immune system.

Other finalists also demonstrate some of the region's traditional strengths in medicine. Two finalists from the Medical Research Council include Zimbabwe-born Dr Neo Morojele, the Pretoria deputy director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Group, and her Cape Town MRC colleague Dr Vikash Sewram, who has been fighting the scourge of cancer of the oesophagus, which strikes down an extraordinarily high proportion of black males in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, apparently due to traditional cleansing practices requiring potentially harmful herbs and vomiting.

Two other shortlisted candidates were AIDS activist and biochemist Dr Debra Meyer of Eldorado Park, who was the only woman and the only black lecturer in the entire faculty of sciences when she joined RAU in 1997, and UCT bioengineer Dr Tania Douglas, who uses medical imaging to diagnose foetal alcohol syndrome, a common cause of retardation in children which normally requires an expensively-trained specialist and an intrusive set of measurements to diagnose. Douglas is also designing a smart microscope with an automated slide dispenser which can detect TB sputum on its own.

More information:

For more information on the awards, go to www.nstf.org.za

Related articles:

Probing dinosaur bones

NSTF South Africa winners 2004

Science in Africa - Africa's First On-Line Science Magazine

Copyright  2002, Science in Africa, Science magazine for Africa CC. All Rights Reserved

Terms and Conditions