"TB kills without prejudice from people to game, but will soon be something of the past. Superhero found!"

With these 100 characters in Afrikaans, Dr Wynand Goosen summarised the essence of his research on TB in game spot on and achieved the second place in the LitNet Einstein competition.

The Einstein competition was held for the first time this year by the academic journal, LitNet Akademies. With the competition, they want to challenge young scientists to make their own research in any academic field accessible to the public, and to create an atmosphere of excitement and actuality around ideas.

Goosen, a researcher at the Division of Molecular Biology and Human Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of Stellenbosch University, recently received his doctoral degree.

During his PhD research he investigated a panel of TB diagnostic markers in buffalos and made a number of interesting findings. "One of these is a method which enables researchers to sterilise blood plasma, place it on a small piece of paper and send it to any place in the world for further analysis," said Goosen.

He is excited about the role that scientists play in the management of diseases in game and plans to do further research on other animal species as well. "In 2012, I was the first student to join the animal TB group of Prof Paul van Helden, Executive Head of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Dr Sven Parsons, a veterinarian and scientist. Today, we are a group of seven students and we are doing unbelievably interesting research on TB in several game species," he said.

Goosen entered the competition because it reminded him of the words spoken by a wise researcher he once met at a conference in Vienna. He told him that it is important that young researchers market themselves, and not to sit and wait that their work does that on their behalf.