• Question: tell me more on how u can help people

    Asked by alya to MarkF, Mark, Michael, Panos, Sarah on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sarah Burl

      Sarah Burl answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I think that vaccines are the most effective way to reduce death by infectious diseases whic are the biggest killers in the world. My work is contributing to the knowledge of vaccines for children and so I am helping in my small way to save lives of millions of children.

    • Photo: Mark Travis

      Mark Travis answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      We are looking at how the immune system goes ‘bad’ and starts attacking our own body- which causes devastating disease. If we can understand what goes wrong, we can try and stop this happeneing and design therapies for the diseases. These so-called autoimmune diseases are beoming much more common. So, if we make major breakthroughs that lead to cures, we can help a lot of people with these diseases.

    • Photo: Mark Fogg

      Mark Fogg answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      In many ways. Through my work by hopefully finding cures for diseases and personally by helping as many people as possible that are less fortunate than myself.

    • Photo: Panos Soultanas

      Panos Soultanas answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Hi alya,

      All science is helping people continuously. In fact if you think about it the fact that we are talking right now is due to science. Everything we do is enabled by science and technology. In my field we work with bacteria and study the mechansism they use to replicate their DNA. These mechanisms are remarkably like the ones humans use. So if we understand this process then we should be able to understand better how cancer comes about and perhaps find new ways to combat it. Another big thing is the emergence of deadly microbes that are resistant to many antibiotics. We urgently need new drug targets to develop new effective antibiotics. There is only 1 class of antibiotics targeting DNA replication at the moment and this is quite poor given the many targets available. Perhaps our studies will aid in the discovery of new antimicrobial drugs one day.

      🙂

Comments