• Question: how will your work make the world a better place?

    Asked by princess_chloe to Kiran, Paul, Sarah, Sharon on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Kiran Meekings

      Kiran Meekings answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      It will make sure that lots of new drugs get into doctors surgeries and hospitals so hopefully we can treat lots of people’s diseases and make the world a healthier (and happier) place…

    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Hi Chloe, thanks for your question. I hope that the work I do will help people suffering from diseases like diabetes or parkinsons disease by using the stem cells that I make to give them new healthy cells after a transplant. By doing this, it would prevent people having to have daily injections, or take lots of drugs, which would make the world a better place!

    • Photo: Paul Stevenson

      Paul Stevenson answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      By itself, my work may not make the world a better place. However, a lot of curiosity-driven basic science – including my area of nuclear physics – has lead to discoveries which then get turned into things that make the world a better place. Without studying nuclear physics, there would be no radiotherapy for cancer treatment, we wouldn’t have the world wide web, and soon hopefully we will have clean, cheap, carbon-free fusion power. I don’t directly work on these applications of nuclear physics, but without the basic research, the applications never happen.

      I also think that trying to understand more about the universe and how it works is part of what makes us human, and striving to learn and understand more makes our culture and society richer, and makes the world a better place in itself.

    • Photo: Sarah Mount

      Sarah Mount answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      That’s a great question! Hopefully it will make computers easier to use. Computers should be a tool to help people do the things they want to do. At the moment people still need to learn quite a lot about computers before they can use them. Ideally, computers would blend seamlessly into the environment and either react to the things you are doing (like, turn lights on and off when you enter or leave a room) or do things automatically for you (like order your food or vacuum the house while you are out). That idea is often called “pervasive” or “ubiquitous” computing.

Comments