• Question: What would you do if your work was banned and was told you were never to do it ever again?

    Asked by juliana to Chris, Emily, Martin, Natalie, Tamsin on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Emily Cook

      Emily Cook answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Form an underground secret society and keep going anyway.

      Lots of scientists over the years have been prevented from doing their research and talking about their ideas but it is important for progress.

      The difficult question would be if you knew your work had the potential to be dangerous and could be used kill/hurt/discriminate (e.g. atomic weapons or gentic engineering) would you still do it? Luckily for me I don’t think mine does so I don’t have to answer that, even hypothetically.

    • Photo: Natalie Stanford

      Natalie Stanford answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Because most of my work is computer based the methods and skills I use are quite generic, it is just my understanding of the area that is more focussed. Hopefully if my research area got banned I would be able to apply the same methods to different areas of research, I’d just have to learn about them first.

    • Photo: Martin Coath

      Martin Coath answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Wow – that is great question!

      Of course scientists HAVE been banned from working, and threatened with prison or torture. Sometimes the books they have written have been banned or burned. These things have happened in the past and still happpen occasionaly in some places.

      What would I do if it happened to me? I hope I would find somewhere where the rules were different – that is what has happened in the past. Scientists have moved to countries where they are welcome.

      What do you think I should do?

    • Photo: Chris Cooper

      Chris Cooper answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Very interesting question. If I found I couldn’t do my job I would take a deep breath, have a couple of months holiday and then look for a different job. I might retrain in a more “people” centred job. Maybe social work – I think they are pretty unfairly treated and could do with some support!

      But “banning” would be a political act. It is difficult to see what context a ban would be made. My work is so varied that banning all my work would have to result in a ban on most of UK science. Any scenario that resulted in that would mean we would have such a dodgy government that my ban would be a minor part. They would surely be doing even worse things to other people! In which case I would be campaigning to get rid of the government.

    • Photo: Tamsin Gray

      Tamsin Gray answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      I would be pretty annoyed – who would ban research into climate change just at the critical time when we need to start doing something about it! But anyway, if I could not do this job I’d have to consider one of the following options:
      1. Professional snowboarder (sounds brilliant but unfortunately never going to happen)
      2. TV weather presenter
      3. Opening my own restaurant and bar in the mountains and going snowboarding and skiing on all my days off
      4. I’ve always quite fancied being an electrician and I know they can earn really good money which could pay for lots of snowboarding holidays

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