And the Boyle medal goes to . . .

FINDING A drug that controls leprosy was an important discovery. So too was the introduction of radium as a way to treat cancers. Delivering a method, first introduced during the BSE crisis, for tracking cattle from the time they leave the farm until they land as a beef steak on your plate was another important advance, along with providing the first early explanations of the structure of a Black Hole, writes DICK AHLSTROM,Science Editor

All of these were accomplished by Irish scientists and all of these scientists were recipients of the Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence. For more than 110 years the Boyle Medal has been awarded to acknowledge exceptional contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge. And while the medal – jointly awarded by its founder the RDS and by The Irish Times – is received with honour by the recipient, most people don’t know the stories behind these great international scientific discoveries.

Clofazimine was developed by an Irish research team led by Vincent C Barry(1908-1975) originally as a treatment for TB. It wasn't effective against the disease but it was later discovered to work very well against leprosy. It quickly became a frontline drug against the disease and is still used today. Barry and colleagues later found a way to make the drug less expensive and donated the patents controlling the drug formula to India to help defray the cost of producing it for use within that country. Barry received the Boyle Medal for his work in 1969.

John Joly(1857-1933) received the Boyle Medal much earlier in 1911. The physicist and geologist was also an inventor. He developed the use of radiotherapy to treat cancers and promoted the opening by the RDS of the Irish Radium Institute. It introduced the "Dublin method" for delivering radium inside a tumour using a needle.

Joly first used salt levels in the oceans to estimate the age of the earth, but later analysed radioactive decay in minerals as a way to deliver a very accurate estimate for the beginning of the Devonian period more than 400 million years ago.

He explained, with Henry Horatio Dixon, the 1916 Laureate, how water can rise to the top of the tallest tree and also invented the “Joly colour process”, the first practical method for colour photography.

Prof Patrick Cunninghambecame the 1996 Boyle Medal Laureate. Now the Government's chief scientific adviser, he developed a system of DNA traceability for the meat industry.

It provided a guaranteed method for tracking the movement of meat from the farmyard to the fork, in the process helping to return consumer confidence to an industry severely damaged by the BSE scare. The method soon went into use throughout Europe and later the US and Canada.

Mathematician and physicist John L Synge(1897-1995) is widely regarded as the greatest Irish mathematician since William Rowan Hamilton. He was also one of the first to study the interior of that gravitational monster, a Black Hole, and also anticipated its structure.

The recipient of the 1972 Boyle Medal, he worked in a range of mathematical areas and influenced a generation of scientists working on Einstein’s relativity. He lectured at Trinity College Dublin and was a senior professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

He worked in the US and also Canada where the Royal Society of Canada instituted the John L Synge Award.

There have been 37 Boyle Medals presented since the inaugural award in 1899. That went to George Johnstone Stoney, the first to introduce the term “electron” to the scientific community.

More recently Prof Derek Briggs, director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, received the 2001 award for his work of world importance on fossils found in the Burgess Shales of Canada.

And Prof Garret FitzGeraldthe McNeil Professor in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania was awarded the 2005 medal for his work showing how heart attack risk could be reduced by administering low-dose aspirin.

The Boyle Medal celebrates excellence in research, but by definition this means research of international importance. It also proves that Irish scientists can have an international standing among their peers.