Paris, January 8 - Gloria Montenegro from Chile, Myeong-Hee Yu from Korea, Pascale Cossart from France and Grace Oludanni L. Taylor from Nigeria received the newly created Helena Rubinstein Awards for Women in Science from Béatrice Dautresme, General Manager of HELENA RUBINSTEIN and UNESCO Director-General Federico Mayor at the Organization's Headquarters yesterday evening.

The Helena Rubinstein Awards for Women in Science were created in 1997 with the support of UNESCO to reward women scientists who have made their mark in medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, botany, agro-food and environmental research. The four prizes, worth $20,000 each, are to be awarded every two years by an international jury of 13 scientists chaired by Nobel Prize for Medicine Laureate Christian de Duve.

The Latin America laureate, the Chilean botanist Gloria Montenegro of the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the Papal Catholic University of Chile, is a teacher and the President of the International Society for Mediterranean Ecosystems and of the Chilean Botanical Society. She pioneered convergence studies of plants living in Mediterranean-type ecosystems. Professor Montenegro has made use of her knowledge of foreign ecosystems in her study of the native Chilean flora, extending scientific knowledge of this flora and introducing rehabilitation programmes for damaged areas or those affected by desertification, for example in the foothills of the Andes.

The laureate for Asia is Korean. Myeong-Hee Yu of the Korean Institute of Science and Biotechnology has spent the last 15 years working on the conformational transition process in proteins. Her research on the problems of folding and stability of a protein, Alpha-1 antitrypsin, a human plasmic inhibitor. In her work, she has traced a direct link between a biological marker and genetic emphysema. The importance of her discovery is increased by the fact that a similar block in the folding process may be involved in other human diseases such as cystic fibrosis and hereditary hypercholesterolaemia. In 1995, Dr Yu received the Korean Molecular Biology Society's 3rd Mockam Award for the best Korean researcher into cellular microbiology of the previous 5 years.

The laureate for Africa is the Nigerian biochemist Grace Oludanni L. Taylor of the University of Ibadan. She has taught at universities in Nigeria and other African countries. She is a specialist in the metabolism of lipids and has worked, notably, on the lipid profile of healthy subjects and of persons suffering from syndromes such as malnutrition and obesity. She has worked in her country and in Trinidad (West Indies) comparing different ethnic groups (post partum parallel study of blood lipids in the mother and the umbilical cord in blacks and Caucasians). Her inter-ethnic comparative physiological and pathological studies have helped expand knowledge of certain risk factors (lipids, nutrition, socio-economic factors) in cardiovascular pathology.

The Europe laureate, Pascale Cossart of France, heads the Bacterial-Cellular Interaction Unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. A chemist by training, she moved towards biochemistry and bacterial genetics. She has been working for the past 10 years on listeria monocytogens, a bacteria particularly dangerous for pregnant women and babies. Her research into listeria monocytogens will sooner or later result in direct therapeutic applications in human clinical medicine and could also serve as a model for our understanding of other intercellular bacteria less suitable for laboratory study. Prof. Cossart was awarded the UNESCO Carlos Finlay Prize in 1995 and the Louis Rapkine Prize in 1997.

The awards were given at a ceremony attended by the leading scientists from all over the world who compose the Jury. During the presentation of the laureates, several figures were mentioned to draw attention to the persistent imbalance between men and women in the sciences, namely the fact that of the 444 science Nobel Prizes awarded to date, women only received 11. Director-General Federico Mayor highlighted the under-representation of women in the sciences and in senior executive positions: "The situation at this end of century reveals a generic asymmetry which should be corrected. We only have 4% of women at the decision system level and 9% of women, world-wide, in parliaments. As a scientist," he continued, "I appreciate enormously the alliance forged today with HELENA RUBINSTEIN to contribute to the adventure of scientific research."

The President of the International Jury, Professor Christian de Duve, Nobel Prize for Medicine laureate, stressed that "All the laureates have succeeded in combining a brilliant scientific career and a veritable life as women. All our laureates are mothers; they prove that the two lives can be combined," he declared.

Béatrice Dautresme, General Manager of HELENA RUBINSTEIN, praised the "active and dynamic co-operation" between UNESCO and the multinational corporation she heads. "UNESCO and HELENA RUBINSTEIN share a long-standing commitment in favor of women. They now have a common aim: to ensure the promotion of women in the world of science - a primordial area for the future of all societies wherever they may be - in which women are, alas, especially under-represented."