• Question: Does your work help peoples's lives

    Asked by vickyyoungs to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 17 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Hi Vicky,
      Thats a good question. My work looks at reducing the amount of pesticides we use in agriculture and designing new biological methods of control.
      I think that is a good thing for the environment and human health. In that way, I am helping people, even if it is in an indirect way!

      Eoin

    • Photo: Charlie Ryan

      Charlie Ryan answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      hi vikyyoung!
      As a aerospace engineer (a rocket scientist of a sort) my work doesn’t directly help people – it isn’t directly life saving (well unless there is an asteroid heading earth’s way and my rockets destroy it! unlikely!!). It could indirectly help people by making their lives easier. The mini rockets i am working on will hopefully make small satellites more manoeuvrable, and this means they could do jobs like observing the earth for climate change research or imaging disasters from orbit. But currently we are still testing these rockets so all this is a long way off!

    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      Hi Vicky. I hope so. There are 300-500 million cases of malaria each year, and more than 1 million deaths, mostly in children under the age of five in Africa. My work is aimed at directly trying to reduce those cases and deaths by developing new drugs and vaccines. You wouldn’t work on malaria for any other reason than trying to help people’s lives – definitely a good reason to show up to work!

    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      Eventually I believe it will. My work is trying to tease out the mechanism by which vitamin A works in the brain. We know it is linked to several psychiatric diseases, and that vitamin A is vitally important to the development of the brain in the fetus which it is hypothesised is when the ground work for psychiatric is laid. A better understanding of this will eventually I hope lead to better treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and Schizophrenia.

    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      Hi Vicky
      It does. Even when we’re not working on new treatments for blindness we’re finding out new things about the cells of the eye, that contribute to work that other people are doing. The sum of all that knowledge, generated by thousands of scientists in labs all over the world, enables a field or subject to advance, and this in turn helps all of us come up with ever better ways of helping people.

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