Sydney  - The first Australian woman to win the Nobel Prize said Tuesday that she was asked as a young student "what's a nice girl like you doing studying science."

Professor Elizabeth Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for her work with two US scientists revealing the existence of an enzyme that helps prevent the fraying of chromosomes that causes ageing and cancer.

As a young student in Australia in the 1960s, she struggled as a woman to be seen as a serious scientist. She remembered being questioned by a family friend whether a young woman should really be studying science.

"It did bring home to me that it wasn't so accepted for women to think about a career in science," she told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio from the University of California in San Francisco, where she is professor of biology.

Blackburn, 60, was born in Tasmania and studied at Melbourne University before completing her doctorate at Cambridge University and moving to Yale University in the United States.

She said women now equal men in the numbers studying biological sciences and going on to doctoral programmes and postdoctoral training.

Blackburn said that women need to break their career for time to have children and attend to family needs.

"We need to have structure in careers so that when the children grow up, women can re-enter science again and not be lost from the field," she said.

Blackburn won the 100th Nobel Prize for Medicine with US colleagues Carol Greider and Jack Szostak. Since 1901, almost 800 people have won Nobels, and Blackburn and Greider bring the number of women laureates to just 37. (dpa)