21 October 2004 Science Student a Top Award Winner for Food Chain Research

New Zealanders love their seafood, but there can be problems lurking inside the shells of certain molluscs harvested from the wild and research on the problem has won Lincoln University's Nicola Turner two top national awards for young scientists.

At the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology's inaugural MacDiarmid Young Scientists of the Year Awards, Nicola took first prize in the Environmental Science category and was runner-up overall for the top prize, the MacDiarmid Gold Medal.

Named after the New Zealand born, Nobel Prize winning chemist Alan MacDiarmid, father of polymers, the awards acknowledge scientists who can effectively communicate their research to the general public and Nicola's poster presentation entry has now shown she is there with the country's best.

Professor MacDiarmid attended the ceremony and Nicola says that being presented with the awards personally by a Nobel Prize winner was something special.

Originally from Hamilton, Nicola has been doing a Master of Science degree at Lincoln University while working as a research technician with the Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd in Christchurch. Her award-winning research for her masters degree has been about food chain contamination by "xenoestrogens" and specifically the contamination of cockles at estuary sites in Otago and Christchurch.

It is work that has fitted in well with her role at ESR in the food safety group.

Estrogens are natural hormones generated within the human body, however some chemicals released into the environment from industries, sewage and other sources can act in a similar way and these are called xenoestrogens.

Xenoestrogens can make their way into waterways and the food chain and some of them can cause health and reproduction problems in wildlife. The aim of Nicola's research was to determine if humans eating cockles from some of the South Island's favourite food gathering areas were being exposed to unacceptable levels of estrogenic chemicals.

Her initial bioassay findings for Otago and Christchurch proved negative but a second bioassay using a different approach has shown positive results.

Nicola sums up the situation at the present time as "Overall, lots of interesting stuff is now known about what works and what doesn't when carrying out analytical procedures for these compounds but there are no grand conclusions yet to solve the real problem."

She says that New Zealand needs to be more aware of estrogenic chemicals getting into the food chain.

There has not been much work done in New Zealand on endocrine disrupting chemicals in the food chain. Nicola's research is therefore a useful contribution domestically to what is a big and increasingly important field overseas and it shows the sort of worthwhile work that young scientists can undertake early in their careers.

The research was carried out in partnership with Ngai Tahu Development Corporation.

For information on science and other courses at Lincoln University visit https://www.lincoln.ac.nz/

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand