Emily Pritchard as the winner of the 2009 BSCB Science Writing Prize. Her essay, Untangling the String was judged to be the winner by Tim Radford, a freelance science writer and former science editor of The Guardian newspaper.

Her essay, entiled Untangling the string, is avalibe on the BSCB website and Lablit.com. The list of runners up are also listed on the BSCB website.

an exert:
Human DNA is long, really really long. Two metres long, in fact. 2m of this string-like polymer is found the nucleus of every human cell. The thing is, human cell nuclei are pretty tiny, only 20μm in diameter (that’s only 1/50th of a millimetre). This means that that 2m of string is tangled and knotted up into nuclei so small that over 100,000 of them can fit into the eye of a needle.