• Question: what is the most important use for your work?

    Asked by anon-175281 to Alex, Alison, David, Ella, hayleypincott, Thomas on 12 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: David Mills

      David Mills answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      Different people use my work for different things – I’d say the two most important uses have been to help people develop new treatments for dental diseases in developing countries. The other important use has been to recover test from old documents, it’s helping historians learn more about our history from primary sources.

    • Photo: Hayley Pincott

      Hayley Pincott answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      Pathology are involved in 70% of patients diagnoses so the way other doctors treat a patient partly depends on our findings. In the lab we get a biopsy and through loads of processes we turn that biopsy into a slide, the slide goes to the pathologists who go to meetings with other healthcare professionals (like radiologists who scan patients, speech therapists who will deal with speech post surgery, oncologists who are cancer doctors and surgeons) to have a huge discussion about what is the best course of treatment for the patient.

      So to answer your question the most important use of what I do in work is contribute to the treatment of a patient.

    • Photo: Ella Mercer

      Ella Mercer answered on 14 Jun 2018:

      My work tries to understand what goes wrong in peoples brains in a disease called Multiple Sclerosis. In this disease the cells in our brains (neurons) can’t talk to each other properly meaning these patients sometimes can’t walk properly and become very tired. When we understand what goes wrong here, we can then work to find a treatment/cure for these people to make them feel better. I think that’s the most important use of my work.

    • Photo: Thomas Perriment

      Thomas Perriment answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      For me it’s the application of my work in developing countries, where they themselves don’t have enough people to protect the population from natural disasters such as landslides, rockfall, and volcanic eruptions. It takes a lot of experience and education to investigate at-risk areas where people currently live, or want to build on, and some countries just don’t have enough money to fund that level of education (or their education system is so new that they don’t have the experience yet!). The most important use of my work is helping those who can’t help themselves, because the solutions and designs we produce for them typically last for over 100 years and help everyone in that community, rather than a single person. Imagine a city, town, or village dependent on imports to survive and the only road into town gets covered by a landslide! People can’t get to hospital, food can’t be delivered etc. That’s where I think my work is most important.

Comments