• Question: Will your work create new knowledge on some already well known areas in science?

    Asked by kayice to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 22 Mar 2011. This question was also asked by taab9697.
    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      I think it will – I’m working in the vitamin A field which is really well established, and applying my findings to neuroscience (the study of the brain), again a well established field. However we know very little about what vitamin A does in the adult brain, so I’m getting a lot of new information that noone knew before

    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi kayice,
      Nice question! The type of work I do: Biological Control of Plant Pests has been happening for centuries. Even Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin wrote about biological control in one of his books around 1800.
      So what I’m working on is buikding on the scientists who have gone before me – standing on the shoulders of giants!

      Eoin

    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi Kayice and taab
      Yes it will. There is already much known about the cells of the eye and what goes wrong with them in disease and blindness. My work builds on that wealth of knowledge to try and see even more deeply into the reasons for the cellular abnormalities, and to try and find new cures.

    • Photo: Charlie Ryan

      Charlie Ryan answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      hi kayice and taab!
      well possibly it might create some new knowledge, and help the field – but only in a very small way!
      The rockets i help design and test are pretty new – they have never been flown on a spacecraft. They’re are microfabricated – this means they are manufactured from silicon in the same way that the microchip inside your computer is. This is pretty novel stuff, and hasn’t been done a great deal before. This is good in one way – i can write a few papers from the results! – but is also bad as sometimes it feels like you’re wandering around blindfolded!

    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      Hi kayice. All science builds on what has been done before to some extent. I work on malaria parasites, which kill more than a million children every year. I couldn’t do what I do without several key discoveries, all the way back to the scientists who first identified the parasite that causes malaria, through the ones who discovered how to grow them in the lab so that we can actually do experiments with them. That’s one of the cool things about science – you build on what is already known, and try to discover something new and unknown. I am trying to discover how malaria parasites recognise and invade human red blood cells and trying to come up with ways to block it. People have been working on this for 20 years, but we are still coming up with new discoveries.

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