• Question: How does your research benefit science?

    Asked by ameliac2011 to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 14 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      My research is looking at reasons why we get arthritis, and what a certain type of protein does in arthritis.

      The results I get will hopefully help doctors treat arthritis in the future, and as pretty much *everyone* gets arthritis eventually, hopefully lots of people will benefit from some of the results I get.

    • Photo: Benjamin Hall

      Benjamin Hall answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      The long term aim of my research is to develop varieties of potato and tomato plant that are able to resist attack by a very serious disease.

      I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Great Irish famine of the mid 1800’s but it caused the death of 1 million people and forced a further 1 million to emigrate. To this day nobody has really come up with a way to stop it.

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      My work is a little less direct than working on a specific disease. I’m working on a method that will allow crystallographers to solve the 3D structures of proteins that current methods have trouble solving. So, by making this technique work we can build 3D structure of lots of proteins involved in all sorts of biological processes and diseases and figure out how they work.

      Once we know how they work we can learn how to make them do more of what they do, if they are helpful proteins, or stop them doing what they do if they are disease causing proteins.

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I work on a variety of different projects and they do not all have the same benefit and objectives, but I’ll give two examples. I work on proteins that make our food taste better, while keeping it healthy. A second job of mine is to improve the instruments we use to look at the structure of crystals. This benefits all the crystallographers because it allows for smaller crystals to be used (it is often very difficult to get crystals that are large enough).

    • Photo: Ed Lowe

      Ed Lowe answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      For the most part, my work helps scientists rather than enriching science directly. What I mean by that is that I help other scientists when their work involves crystallography, so it can be anything from studying the parasites that cause malaria one day to how the DNA in your cells is properly duplicated and parceled out when a cell splits on two on the next day.
      The variety is pretty interesting!

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