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Asked by brainiac1996 to Chris, Emily, Martin, Natalie, Tamsin on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: Benefits.
Question: What do you think you research will help change?
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Emily Cook answered on 16 Mar 2010:
I hope the two parts of my research will each be of use.
I think that using scattered x-rays to scan parcels and luggage will provide a system that is much better at identifying specific materials which would make it easier to detect explosives and drugs making our society a safer place. Anythign that can make waiting at airports shorter has to be godd, right?
In the medical side of my work I use the same technique to tell the difference between breast cancer and healthy tissue. This could be used to examine biopsies so that if a woman is worried she might have breast cancer she can get the result faster. Imagine how stressed you would be if you had to wait a couple of days for the results. With this technique you could find out in a few minutes – which would be a big relief to most woman.
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Martin Coath answered on 16 Mar 2010:
I can think of many things that could change but I will stick to just one for this answer.
Computers are still very primitive in comparison to brains. We program computers to do loads of stuff for us but they are still slow, heavy, and consume masses of electricity, and are just plain dumb!
We already have ways of building electronic devices that are more like brains but we don’t know how to wire them up or teach them to do anything useful.
That is what my research is about. If we can understand how the brain works, and can simulate it, then we can start to build computers that are smart, light, and will run for three months on two AA cells! 🙂
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Chris Cooper answered on 16 Mar 2010:
I would say this is a very difficult question to answer. One of the things about science is you research stuff that you think is good for one thing, but it turns out it will be good for something else entirely. No one thought X-Rays would be any use when they were invented for example!
In the short term I think my research has changed the way people think about how oxygen is consumed in the body. I have showed that a gas – nitric oxide – which was originally thought of as a pollutant, can affect how our cells make use of oxygen. But 10-15 years from now I might give a completely different answer for the same bit of research! Science moves on and makes use of old theories in ways we don’t expect.
On the practical side I am happy I played a (very) small part in a big team looking at cooling the head of newborn babies to prevent brain damage. This is now done routinely in many hospitals.
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Natalie Stanford answered on 17 Mar 2010:
My research will help to improve our understanding of how the complex network of reactions in the metabolism interact. This will allow to understand more about metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. It will also help us to understand how we can change the growth conditions of cells in order to produce more of certain chemicals that naturally occur in the cells. This will allow us to collect these naturally produced products so we can use them for biofuels, medicines or even as food colourings and flavours. Most of this research is done using yeast cells. This means we can grow them easily and cheaply and we don’t need to test on animals. Yeast cells help us a lot with studying human cells because they have a very similar metabolism.
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