US biochemical engineer wins $1.2 million technology prize

HELSINKI (AP) — American biochemical engineer Frances Arnold, whose discoveries in "directed evolution" have helped produce medicines, including drugs for treating diabetes, on Tuesday was awarded this year's euro 1 million ($1.2 million) Millennium Technology Prize.

The 59-year-old professor of chemical engineering, bioengineering and biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was cited for "groundbreaking work that has a great impact on areas such as pharmaceuticals and gene therapy," with hundreds of laboratories and companies around the world using methods she developed, committee chairman Jarl-Thure Eriksson said.

The previous winner, in 2014, was British-American physicist Stuart Parkin for discoveries leading to a thousand-fold increase in digital data storage on magnetic disks used in large data centers, cloud services, social networks and downloads of music and film online.