• Question: How has your work helped people so far?

    Asked by Bill Nye The Dabbing Guy to Craig, Devon, Marta, Natalie, Nicholas on 8 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Nicholas Younger

      Nicholas Younger answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      So far my work hasn’t helped anyone, but I’ve only been at it for about a year. I think by the end, it might be getting close to helping. It takes a long time for work done in a lab to filter down to help treat people, but I’m determined to help develop a treatment by the end of my career.

      I’m going next month to talk to patients that have the cancer I study to tell them about what I do. My research can’t help them yet, but I hope just knowing that someone is trying their hardest every day to work towards a treatment helps them feel a little better, even for a moment.

    • Photo: Marta Varela

      Marta Varela answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      Hi Bill Nye.

      Scientific work helps people in subtle ways and it is hard to pinpoint them all. I will tell you what I feel is my greatest contribution so far.

      For my PhD, I developed a set of MRI scans that measured how much blood went to newborn babies’ brains without harming them. Many premature babies have health problems and it is hard to know how these affect their brain. The scans I invented helped the doctors looking after these babies to assess how well their brain was coping with bring born early and whether they needed drugs or other medical interventions to help keep their brain healthy.

    • Photo: Craig O'Hare

      Craig O'Hare answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      Hi Bill,

      My work will hopefully once day lead to the design of better vaccines and drugs to fight off viral infections.

      It can take a long time for discoveries in these areas to move into hospitals and clinical trials though, usually 3-5 years if we’re really rushing. My own work was only published last month so at least that’s a start!

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