25 Aug 2004, The Daily Telegraph

Cheeky, stimulating... and passionate

The standard of entries for this year's young science writer awards is higher than ever. Roger Highfield announces the winners

Meeting of the minds: Amarendra Swarup, 27, of Imperial College, and Caoimhe McKenna, 18, meet at the Science Museum, London

Three-headed frogs, the use of television to teach salmon, and how to squeeze laboratories on to microchips were just a few of the topics tackled by the latest entries to the nation's most prestigious science writing competition.

The quest to find promising writers was launched by Carol Vorderman, who declared her "passionate" support for the competition. The television presenter's appeal to 16- to 28-year-olds to compete for £7,000 of prizes, trips to America and the chance to get their name in print triggered more than a million hits on the competition website.

Printed here are the two winning entries to the competition, now in its 17th year thanks to the sponsorship of the chemical company BASF. Judge and chairman of BASF, Barry Stickings, praised the high and even standard of the latest crop of entries.

• Judging: Around 120 of this year's batch of 347 entries made it to the first stage, when they were divided into batches. Pairs of judges voted for their favourites, while taking account of style, novelty, the difficulty in popularising the subject, poor grammar, contrived metaphors, muddled structure and impenetrable jargon. After this sift we were left with 46 shortlisted entries, which were then judged in a final session at Canary Wharf.
 

Prof Heinz Wolff, Institute of Bioengineering, pores over the high standard of entrants

Each judge had a firm idea of what to look for. Potential winners must grab the reader's interest, said Prof Lewis Wolpert: "They have to get the first couple of paragraphs right."

They must be original. For once, Jeremy Webb of New Scientist did not have to weed out any entries which had leant too heavily on his magazine for inspiration, as had happened often before.

They need a foundation of good research. Sir Roland Jackson pointed out how entries came to life when the author had grilled an individual scientist, rather than worked from a paper or press release.

They needed passion. "And that passion must start with the first paragraph," said Barry. "It means they really want to write about it and they really want to tell someone about it."

Above all else, which entries were good enough to appear on this page? The judges found it hard to decide. "I enjoyed reading them all this year. Not only that, the subjects they tackled were much wider. And there was a lot of chemistry, which is nice," said Dr Adam Hart-Davis.

Judging was, as ever, marked by endless wrangling over issues of style over substance, whether (as Prof Heinz Wolff claims) it is more important to interest the reader than impress scientists with the novelty of the subject.

There were squabbles on arcane issues such as the physics of levitating frogs. Amid the many discussions came many funny moments, not least when Adam held up an entry and declared to the panel: "I have heard about this before because my lover is married to a vision scientist."

• Younger Category (15-19): "It is amazing what they come up with at this age," commented Mary Archer. We learnt about instant cancer screening by GPs (Isla Kennedy), music therapy (James Baren), climate flips (Madeleine Berg) and the use of brain scanners to work out the impact of advertising (Claire Standley). The last particularly impressed Jeremy Webb, since New Scientist was about to publish a special issue on "neuromarketing".

Last year, Clare Neve won with an entry which described how she was driven to find out the science of stretching by her own love of athletics. This year, her entry on how dogs can sniff out cancer did well in the initial round of judging. Barry was taken with how she had tackled a quite different subject. "She has done something which is quite remarkable."

Another strong entry, on the genetics of colour vision, came from Caoimhe McKenna. This contained more science and was "cheeky and engaging," said Jeremy. "You can't knock it," added Lewis. After much hand wringing, and discussion of how to pronounce Caoimhe ("Keeva"), it went to the vote. Caoimhe beat Clare into second place – but only just.

• Older Category (20-28): The standard was high and there were impressive entries on tougher subjects, such as Andrew West's article on electronic ink, Claire Tilstone's description of quorum sensing - "gossiping" bacteria - and Alistair Moore's discussion of how to miniaturise laboratories.

At the start, Lewis Dartnell seemed to be in the lead with his article on the extraordinary camouflage used by the common cuttlefish. But then a rival emerged in the form of Amarendra Swarup's account of the arsenic poisoning disaster in Bangladesh. Given the paucity of entries on astronomy, it was striking that Amarendra chose this topic rather than his own field of expertise as a theoretical physicist studying the early universe.

After a discussion of whether to offer them both first place, and an accusation from Adam that I had voted illegally, Amarendra came first. Amarendra had put a "new twist on a long running story," said Sir Roland.

Overall, said Heinz, he was struck how this year's entry marked one of the rare times that the older group was more stimulating than the young. "We no longer get bits of their PhD thesis, as we did some years ago."

• The prizes: the British Association will invite the top four to its annual meeting in early September at the University of Exeter. The two overall winners will also attend the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting next February in Washington, and each receive £500. Those pushed into second place will receive £250 and will be published in weeks to come. Runners-up also win subscriptions to Nature and New Scientist, and each receive £100. Once again, The Daily Telegraph, BASF and the British Association would like to thank the hundreds of people who submitted entries.