• Question: Why is your research important? What are the possible real world applications?

    Asked by shauno grouts to Shuo, Neil, Martin, Leonie, Lauren, Ciorsdaidh, Alan on 5 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 377mecm24, logyboags.
    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      I work on coming up with new medicines for new of existing diseases. I have worked on diseases that you will have commonly heard of like cancer or Alzheimers but I have also worked on diseases that you might not have heard of but are just as important and kill just as many people. Imagine you suffered from one of these not so heard of diseases? Who is doing the research to find the cure? Is anyone? Here at Dundee we have become a world recognised facility for research into such diseases, diseases that the patients don’t have the money or the means to get their treatment. Not only is it our job to find the cure but make it affordable for them. Did you know that 1 in 100 (roughly) projects make it into clinical status? What happened to the 99? Well, they found out 99 ways that it couldn’t be done…you just need 1.

    • Photo: Ciorsdaidh Watts

      Ciorsdaidh Watts answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      One of the things I love about my chosen career path is that working in the field of cancer research allows me as a chemist to work on designing and synthesising new compounds which could eventually one day be important in medicine, or at least in our understanding of how diseased like cancer work. Each small step forward made when chemists, biologists and other scientists work together eventually leads to the advances made in tackling these diseases in the real world.

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      Research isn’t always about finding real world applications. It’s about extending our knowledge and understanding of how things work. For somethings that might give us applications but for others any applications may be many, many years away if there are any at all. I would pose a question back to you… would you ask an artist why they painted a particular painting and what’s it’s application?

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      The importance is my research is developing new motifs (little bits of a molecule, sort of like a functional group) that could be used in lots of different type of applications from drugs, to agrochemicals to materials and electronics.

      These motifs don’t immediately have a real world application on their own (that’s not the point of what my group does), but the research will help other chemists to incorporate them into their functional molecules. It doesn’t mean that our research doesn’t have a direct real world application, as long as it helps to develop tools that can be used.

      This was much the same in my PhD too. I was making tool molecules to study how our cells send messages when molecules dock at the cell surface. Ultimately this research could lead to treatments for people with irregular heart rhythms, but our focus was making the tool-compounds to study each part of the signalling pathway, while not affecting other signalling events from other pathways.

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      My research does happen to have real life applications. Almost all (yes all) chemicals made by mankind are made using a catalyst. So if I discover a super-duper catalyst then it could be used in a refinery to covert oil into other things. For example, did you realise that plastic bags are made from oil? To do this you need to use 3 very special catalysts.

    • Photo: Shuo Zhang

      Shuo Zhang answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      My research mainly focuses on creating artificial human tissues for transplantation, like bones, skins and nervous tissue. Every year loads of people suffer the pain of tissue damage, and these artificial tissue would be of great value if succesfful developed and put into markets.

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