• Question: In what way is your aspect of science developing for the better?

    Asked by ltomaschek to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Dalya Soond

      Dalya Soond answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Wow, too many ways to list them all here.

      Top of my list would be that we are learning how to develop drugs that will work best with a patients individual genetics and biochemistry rather than give everyone the same drugs. You can get the same disease symptoms due to different genetic causes. A drug that might work best for one patient because it acts on one biochemical pathway might not work at all or will actually worsen another’s symptoms. This is called personalised medicine.

    • Photo: Tim Millar

      Tim Millar answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hopefully it will reduce the spread of cancer which is what eventually leads to death so that people can live to their potential age and more and have a better quality of life whilst they do

    • Photo: Tom Crick

      Tom Crick answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      Technology is now a crucial part of our lives — we are increasingly reliant on technology, especially microprocessors (they are everywhere: computers, mobile phones, cars, toys, fridges!). However, this reliance means that we now have problems integrating all of these different systems, as well as meeting their huge power demands.

      I hope that my research will provide tools to optimise devices for low-power (or low-resource) consumption — this means that we will all use less power (a good thing for the environment and our rapidly depleting natural resources) as well as making better use of our electronic devices. This could have a significant impact on a huge amount of people in the world.

      (However, I don’t think I would argue that it is more important than curing cancer or creating new drugs!)

    • Photo: Derek McKay-Bukowski

      Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      My aspect of science is radio receivers (whether a radio telescopes for detecting signals from deep space, or a radar receiver, that can listen to the faint echoes from scientific radars).

      The big change in recent years is the speed and power of digital signal processing. These days electronics is sufficiently cheap, that we can do everything digitally.

      This means that we can detect rapid variations, we can quickly switch the way the telescope is looking, we can even look in multiple directions at once… all made possible by cheap, high-speed digital electronics.

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I hope that by creating a diagnostic blood test that I can help doctors diagnose their patients in the early stages of cancer, to get people treated as soon as possible and hopefully save lives.

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