The Edinburgh Medal is a prestigious award given each year at the Edinburgh International Science Festival to men and women of science and technology whose professional achievements are judged to have made a significant contribution to the understanding and well-being of humanity.
The Medal will be awarded at a ceremony which will be followed by the Edinburgh Medal Address by this year's winner, DNA fingerprinting inventor Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys. Sir
Alec will discuss the techniques for DNA-based identification, which emerged completely by accident for research in the 1980s on gene evolution, and ethics of how this process could and should be used.
The first Edinburgh Medallist in 1989 was the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam, of the subsequent nineteen Medallists three have gone on to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
Tickets are £8 (£6 conc)
2010: Inventor of genetic fingerprinting wins 22nd Edinburgh Medal
Edinburgh Medal Recipients
- 1989 Professor Abdus Salam
- 1990 Professor Stephen J Gould
- 1991 Professor Jane Goodall
- 1992 Professor Heinz Wolff
- 1993 Professor Wangari Maathai
- 1994 Professor Manuel Pattarroyo
- 1995 Sir John Crofton
- 1996 Professor Richard Levins
- 1997 Professor Amartya Sen
- 1998 Sir David Attenborough
- 1999 Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell
- 2000 Professor Lynn Margulis
- 2001 Sir John Sulston
- 2002 Lise Kingo
- 2003 Professor Wang Sung
- 2004 Professor Stephen Rose
- 2005 Professor Colin Blakemore
- 2006 Professor James Lovelock
- 2007 Dr Richard Horton
- 2008 Professor Chris Rapley CBE
- 2009 Professor John Beckwith
- 2010 Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys