Science guru's other first prize

Science guru's other first prize

Sir Paul Callaghan considers himself a lucky man. Not because he's the leader of the team that has won this year's Prime Minister's Science Prize of $500,000.

He's won prizes before, plenty of them - the Ampere Prize, the Rutherford Medal and the Gunther Laukien Prize among them.

Nor does he link his luck to the fact that his team's work in the rarefied world of nuclear magnetic resonance is so widely published - 250 scientific papers between the five of them with a citation "h-index" of 46, putting them up with Nobel Prize winners.

"I've been hugely well recognised and I sometimes wonder why - I've been lucky that way," he says with typical modesty.

The reason Sir Paul regards himself as lucky is that he's still here. Diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2008, he had surgery and chemotherapy, but the outlook wasn't great.

"The tumour had got through the wall and spread cells into my abdominal cavity. I had multiple tumours throughout my peritoneum."

It was a fatal condition with no cure.