An
Australian scientist has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize, a humorous
parody of the more serious Swedish counterpart, for creating a way to
unboil an egg.
Chemistry professor Colin Raston from Flinders University in Adelaide built a machine which can unravel proteins.
He said he had his 'Eureka' moment when he fed a boiled hen egg into the machine and it came back uncooked.
'Wow, did I really do that?' Professor Raston said at the time.
The
machine, which has been called a vortex fluidic device, works
by unfolding the proteins in egg whites back to their natural state.
It has been hailed as a potential game-changer for the targeted delivery of chemotherapy drugs for cancer treatment.
Professor
Raston said: 'It's living the dream. All scientists want to do
something that is significant, but this has the wow factor.
'It's not
what we set out to do, to unboil an egg, but it's the way of explaining
the science involved and helping the wider world realise the
momentousness of it.'
'The
sheer scale of this is mind boggling. The global pharmaceutical
industry alone is worth $160 billion annually and the processing of
proteins is central to it.
'The
VFD is completely changing it – and is set to do the same for the fuel
and food industries. It's impossible to place a price on the value of
this device.
'Winning an Ig is both humbling and amazing.'
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