• Question: have you ever invented any thing

    Asked by munaiba to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by jjfarooq, zarah246.
    • Photo: Dalya Soond

      Dalya Soond answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Absolutely not. I have never invented anything in my life. I study what Nature invented instead.

    • Photo: Tim Millar

      Tim Millar answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I have two patents so I must have invented something. They are both for a method of drying and using milk for mothers with HIV so that they can feed their children without passing on the HIV virus.

    • Photo: Derek McKay-Bukowski

      Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      There are often things that I build or design which, in their own way, are inventions. For example, designing a particular bracket made of metal to hold an antenna together is an invention of sorts. Mind you, I don’t sell these things; they get used in the project and then you move on. But there certainly hasn’t been any major product invention (like, for example, the light-bulb) that I’ve done. But science isn’t necessarily about inventing things. It is about understanding them. Sometimes that leads to an invention, but that is usually quite rare.

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I sort of “discovered” a new chemical compound. It had never been made before and never reported. It has a big long chemical name, but for short I am going to call it “TMPO”. Its chemical formula is C9H16O2N2.

      The important thing about TMPO is that it is a Spin Label. This means that I can use it to label some of the biomolecules involved in the growth of cancer and then we can study them and learn about what they do in the body and how it causes cancer to grow.

      This is pretty important because the more we find out about how cancer grows, the more ideas we have about how we can fight it or target it. So this spin label is really important and hopefully it will help us discover new drugs for the treatment of cancers.

      I did invent a game called “Hot Socks” with my old flatmates. It’s not much of a game but basically when somebody was ironing their clothes, you took your socks off and chucked them at her and then she would iron them for you and chuck them back and you had to put them back on lightning fast to enjoy delightful toasty feet! Ahhhh! So nice after a long day standing in the lab!

    • Photo: Tom Crick

      Tom Crick answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I’ve invented a framework for generating provably optimal computer code for microprocessors using a technique called Answer Set Programming: this is a form of logic programming, which means using mathematical logic to model and reason about real-world problems.

      But it can be computationally expensive i.e. may take some time to run, even on hundreds of computers!

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