Experts in everything from sardines to bones, nuclear reactions and throat cancer walked away with new awards at the sixth annual National Science and Technology Forum Awards in Kempton Park last week.
University of Cape Town (UCT) zoology lecturer Coleen Moloney spends her days crunching data on a computer, but her mind is always on the ocean. Moloney develops computer models that predict how fishing changes the balance of the oceans from year to year, affecting everything from minute marine bacteria to teenagers 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 a R100 000 research grant, sponsored by the electricity giant Eskom, for women academics who have been instrumental in nurturing a more diverse crop of 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 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 into 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 winner of another new R50 000 award, sponsored by the National Research Foundation to highlight work done by senior black scientists in the past 10 years.
UCT professor Mohamed Iqbal Parker and his team fight cancer of the oesophagus. Although not very high-profile, this disease 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,” Parker says.
Black males, especially those in the former Transkei and KwaZulu-Natal, are particularly vulnerable, apparently owing 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 pressure because of HIV and tuberculosis, 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 Professor Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan. She throws the bones in ways that would not be recognised by any sangoma: using a diamond-edged cutting wheel, she slices off paper-thin fragments of fossilised bones and studies their microstructure to solve debates such as how long it took dinosaurs to reach adulthood.
Her verdict: about 30 years for some of the veggie-eating giants lumbering through swamps in what eventually became the Karoo.
“Dinosaurs were around for a lot longer than we have been. We can learn a lot about our own evolution from them,” she says.
Meanwhile, the country’s first African female PhD in mathematics education, Dr Mamokgethi Setati of Wits University, is still breaking new ground. She won a 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.
She is also the founder of the National Association for Mathematics Educators in South Africa.
Setati practises what she preaches. She has erected a whiteboard in her lounge, next to the TV, and puts a new maths problem on it every week.
“My 13-year-old son gets an award if he solves the problem within a few days. If he doesn’t … well, everything in my house is run on points,” says Setati.
Dr Tshilidzi Marwala, another Wits academic, won the award for up-and-coming black male scientists. The information engineer from the Limpopo is interested in creating intelligent computers.
A new set of fellowships for female scientists, as well as for science of particular importance to women, closes on June 30. Information and application forms are online at www.sarg.org.za