• Question: why do you think your job is so important?

    Asked by purpledino to Clare, Mariana, Pedro, Robert, Susanne on 12 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by mich.
    • Photo: Robert Insall

      Robert Insall answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      Here’s one answer for you.

      Approximately 60 years ago, if a child had leukaemia, they would die in about 3 months. No “ifs” or “buts”, it was lethal; there were particular wards in hospital for the kids with leukaemia, and they walked in, but came out on a trolley.

      Nowadays, if a child has leukaemia, they will **probably** survive. There are probably some students in your school who had leukaemia when they were kids (why not ask around?), and who have grown up normal and healthy and had kids of their own.

      If you had a chance – even a chance – of making a difference like that would you take it?

    • Photo: Clare Taylor

      Clare Taylor answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      Robert is right, just 50 or 60 years ago people had little chance of surviving cancer, but look how different things are now because of all of the work done by scientists. Let me give you a different example, between 1918 and 1919 somewhere between 20 – 50 million people died from influenza. Nowadays, although lots of people still get flu, people dying from flu is much less common because we have a vaccine and medication because of the work of scientists. I do my research because it will generate knowledge that will help us find ways to treat diseases, so I think it’s pretty important. If you think of all of the science going on all over the world, think of the difference it all makes in everyone’s life from medicines to computers to food production. Without it we wouldn’t survive…

    • Photo: Susanne Muekusch

      Susanne Muekusch answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      hi purpledino

      I think science in general is very important for the society. If we are honest, for most of the cancer research done, it doesn’t have any effect for the patients. Yet. But it might, and that’s the beauty of science. For most things we have no idea what it will be good for and that translates to all the basic sciences (as opposed to the applied sciences).

      You cannot predict what knowledge will be useful in the future and what will not be important. I do my job and add my little piece of knowledge and hope it will turn out to be useful for something somedays.

    • Photo: Mariana Campos

      Mariana Campos answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      I think my job is important because this is such a complicated world that every little bit and piece of information will help us understand the big picture, even if I don’t work directly in trying to find a cure for cancer. I am trying to understand what happens in a healthy tissue and I think that, if we understand this we might be closer to understand what happens when things go wrong, like in cancer;)

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