• Question: will your work improve lives? how?

    Asked by looneymidget to Louise, Michaela, Sian, Steve, Yvette on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by ebungaskarth96, vampiregal, jonbanfield, lolliiex, michaelcullen10.
    • Photo: Steven Kiddle

      Steven Kiddle answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hopefully, but i don’t know. In research you never know what you will find.

      If we understood how plants respond to disease we could make them better at surviving. This will increase the amount of food available, which is important to sustain a growing population and to protect people from starvation.

    • Photo: Michaela Livingstone

      Michaela Livingstone answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Potentially, further down the line when we understand more there’s a chance that my work could lead to treatments for cancer to be developed. Both the proteins that I’m working on are sometimes found to be “turned up” in cancers. By that I mean that there’s more of these proteins in a tumour then you might find in a normal collection of cells, or tissue.

      The proteins themselves probably don’t cause cancer, but they might act as controls that allow other proteins that may be involved with cancer to be switched on, or turned up.

      If we could find a way to turn down the proteins that I’m working on it’s possible that it might in turn stop the other proteins that actually worsen a cancer from being made, and that might slow down a cancer or stop it altogether. That’s the hope anyway.

    • Photo: Sian Harding

      Sian Harding answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      If it works it will give people with heart failure a longer life and one without symptoms. Our first results in people are hopeful

    • Photo: Louise Johnson

      Louise Johnson answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I can’t see any obvious direct applications, but you never know what’s going to be useful in future.

    • Photo: Yvette Wilson

      Yvette Wilson answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      We are trying to develop second generation biofuels (first generation biofuels use food parts of plants and therefore competes with food production over land). If we are successful, it will be economical to make fuel from waste parts of plant. This has many benefits to all of us – we decrease the use of fossil fuels, there is no overall emission of carbon dioxide as it is stored in the plants while they are growing (therefore slowing down global warming) and also ethanol is a cleaner and more efficient fuel than petrol and diesel.

Comments