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Asked by belloyus to Louise, Michaela, Sian, Steve, Yvette on 13 Jun 2010 in Categories: Your Research. This question was also asked by tugii, tpanda1517.
Question: how enviromentally friendly is your research?
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Sian Harding answered on 12 Jun 2010:
Its fine, the virus I use for clinical trial is inactivated so it cant escape and infect others. My worst effect on the planet is flying to conferences all the time!
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Yvette Wilson answered on 12 Jun 2010:
Reasonably. I sometimes have to grow plants during winter…in Scotland…so I may use artificial lighting during this period which uses more energy than necessary. I do try my best to avoid doing this. Some laboratory experiments use (very small amounts) of toxic and hazardous chemicals which have to be disposed of. Again I try to use protocols that don’t need these chemicals as I don’t like working with them, but sometimes its really unavoidable. On the upside, long term, my results should have definite environmentally friendly benefits – a much cleaner source of fuel that has not taken up extra land to grow.
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Louise Johnson answered on 12 Jun 2010:
I worked in an ecology lab in Virginia that was studying how a plant disease spread through America from Europe and how easily it could switch from host to host. Introduced species and disease are big environmental threats – so I suppose that’s the most environmentally friendly science I’ve ever done!
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Michaela Livingstone answered on 13 Jun 2010:
If I’m honest, I’d say it’s not very environmentally friendly – we have to dispose a lot of plastic tips and tubes, just because we can’t risk things from one experiment contaminating another and so on. In my lab we try to recycle as much as we can though.
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