Jenny Graves wins Australia's $250,000 prime minister's prize for science
Jenny Graves transformed our understanding of how sex chromosomes work, and led to the realisation that the human male Y chromosome may be on a path to extinction. For that and a slew of other groundbreaking work, Graves has been awarded Australia’s top science prize.
Graves, now at La Trobe University, helped pioneered the field of “comparative genomics”, where the function of different parts of genomes are compared between species, in order to understand how they have evolved – and how they continue to evolve.
She helped discover the gene on the human Y chromosome that is responsible for the male sex developing. And in a paper from 2002, she made the surprising hypothesis that the Y chormosome may disappear in about 4.5m years – a finding she described as a “throwaway line” that received enormous scientific and public attention.
The paper discussed findings revealing that over the years the male Y chromosome had lost almost all its genes. Our non-human ancestors began with about 1,600 genes on the Y chromosome 166m years ago. And since that time, it has been whittled down to just 50 or so. If that trend continued, the chromosome would disappear in about 4.5m years, Graves said.
Subsequent work suggested the Y chromosome might have stabilised in its degraded state. And Graves pointed out that over 4.5m years, if it did disappear, humans might evolve another way of determining sex.
“In any case, 4.5m years is a long time. We have been human for less than 100,000 years,” she wrote in 2014. “And I can think of several ways in which we are likely to become extinct long before we run out of Y chromosome.”
Much of her work has involved the comparison of the genes of Australian animals – kangaroos, platypuses and reptiles, which, when compared with human genomes, revealed a lot because of how distant they are in the evolutionary tree, representing enormous amounts of separate evolution.
Her work has led to discoveries that have helped improve understanding of human disorders involving the immune system and blood proteins as well as the strange contagious cancer that has been threatening the Tasmanian devil with extinction.
Her work has also focussed on the role of epigenetics – how genes are switched on and off. And she has helped discover the enormous variety of different ways that genes or the environment determine sex in other animals.
For her pioneering investigations of the genetics of sex, Graves has received the $250,000 prime minister’s prize for science, it was announced on Wednesday.
While both her parents were scientists, Graves said she wasn’t particularly interested in science at school until her final year when she had a biology teacher she found inspiring. Even then, she didn’t like biology until they began studying genetics, she says. “I was hooked from that time on, and decided I’d do science at university.”
Graves has published more than 440 scholarly works, which have been cited more than 17,000 times.
Also recognised in the prime minister’s prizes for science were three other scientists and two teachers.
Eric Reynolds, a professor of dental science at the University of Melbourne, discovered a protein in milk that helps repair and strengthen teeth. For inventing and commer-
cialising a way of putting that protein in gum and other products, Reynolds was awarded the prime minister’s prize for innovation.
The Frank Fenner prize for life scientist of the year went to Jian Yang from the University of Queensland for work helping reveal that genetic variation in complex traits like obesity, cognitive ability, and schizophrenia is due to the contribution of a large number of genetic variants across the genome.
The Malcolm McIntosh prize for physical scientist of the year was awarded to Dayong Jin from the University of Technology Sydney for creating new kinds of microscopes that allow observation of molecules at work inside living cells.
Neil Bramsen, a teacher at Mount Ousley public school, received the 2017 prime minister’s prize for excellence in science teaching in primary schools. He was honoured for for innovative partnerships with scientists, the community and other schools to foster students’ enthusiasm, knowledge and skills in science.
Brett McKay from Kirrawee high school received the prime minister’s prize for excellence in science teaching in secondary schools for his achievements in inspiring his students to love science and to use it in their daily lives.