• Question: Why is the work you do important?

    Asked by Jemizle to Alan, Ciorsdaidh, Lauren, Leonie, Martin, Neil, Shuo on 6 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Lets take antibiotics. You might have heard about super bugs and how these are becoming increasingly difficult to kill. This is because the “bugs” have become very clever and have found a way to make sure the antibiotics you take do not harm them. So how many antibiotics out there work? Just 1! Now if all the bugs out there started to also become super bugs, how would you be able to fight them? What would happen to you? One of our groups projects is to work on finding a new antibiotic, one that the “bugs” have not seen before, one that will kill the bugs. What happens to you? You live!

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      I make catalysts and catalysts make chemicals. So without the catalysts we cant make the chemicals. That means we can’t make petrol to power our cars. Perhaps it means we can’t make the key chemical we need in order to make a medicine. So I like to think catalysts are important 🙂

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      The work I do in the lab day-to-day is not going to change the world on it’s own… but it will help. My group develops new molecules that contain fluorine that can be used for a large number of different applications. At the moment, we’re making small molecules that could be joined together with other molecules to make drugs, agrochemicals, battery materials, liquid crystals or even tools to diagnose cancers. We don’t make all of these things ourselves (we work with lots of other groups together), but our contribution to understanding how the properties of these molecules change when you add fluorine atoms helps the whole chemistry community across the world.

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 15 Mar 2018:

      It depends how you define important. So people would argue that science must produce something useful other than just knowledge. But in the last day or so there has been a lot of coverage of the death of Professor Stephen Hawkings. No-one would deny the importance of his work even although it produced no technological advance of value. My own work in astrochemistry is likewise simply to produce a deeper understanding of the Universe that we live in and I my own view that is important.

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