Question: what would be your dream breakthrough within your expertise in science?

Ed Lowe answered on 17 Jun 2013:

I think I’d have to give two answers here!

Within my more day to day work the ideal breakthrough would have to be finding something of great medical significance – I’m currently working on the parasites that cause malaria and discovering anything that led to a better vaccine or cure would be hugely exciting.

In the field of crystallography there is a huge stumbling block called the ‘phase problem’ which means we can never directly see some of the most important information about the structures we are looking at and have to infer or calculate it. A way to solve that directly would be a dream breakthrough, although it will probably remain a dream throughout my lifetime.