And the winner is...

The European Inventor Awards were announced yesterday in Paris. Winner of the Popular Prize (from a 32% share voted by some 47,000 of you) is Australia's Ian Frazer and the late Jian Zhou, from China, for their invention of the world's first vaccine against cervical cancer. Gardasil is a breakthrough as it protects girls and women from the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV), and has already saved the lives of large numbers of women worldwide.

Also honoured are: Liftetime Achievement Award - Andreas Manz (Switzerland) for the invention of microlab chip technology; Industry - Franz Amtmann (Austria) and Philippe Maugars (France), together with their teams at Dutch company NXP Semiconductors, received the award for their contribution to the development of Near Field Communication (NFC) - a contact-free, secure technology for data transfer between mobile devices; Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) - Laura van 't Veer (Netherlands) for the invention of a gene-based tissue test which makes it possible to offer targeted treatment for breast cancer; Research - Ludwik Leibler (France) for the invention of vitrimers: a new class of plastics which has the potential to stem the mountains of plastic waste; and Non-European countries - Sumio Iijima, Akira Koshio and Masako Yudasaka (Japan) received the award for the ground-breaking discovery of carbon nanotubes, a previously unknown structural form of carbon, and for the development of a sustainable process to produce them.