• Question: how does your work help/have an effect on other people?

    Asked by leahclough to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      My research is on “basic science” so it does not have an immediate application to help people. But say, if I discovered some important interaction of molecules and cells relating to Alzheimer’s disease this could be used to develop drugs to prevent or stop the disease. In general, basic science is 20-30 years behind the production of new medicines or treatments. So it is a long term investment which could still, in princible, benefit the young people of today.

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      At the moment me and others are trying to understand how schizophrenia works. Specifically we have found a number of genes and proteins that can cause schizophrenia if they are “damaged” in some way. By figuring out what these genes and proteins do when they are working correctly, we hope to understand how they case schziophrenia when they go wrong. This will hopefully put us in a good position to figure out how to fix them and hopefully treat schziophrenia.

      So for the time being, the work will not have a huge affect on anyone else. However, 10 years down the line maybe we would start to see new treatments for schziophrenia being developed as a result of it.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Thanks for your question. Most of my work is about finding out what happens in the ‘normal’ brain during listening to speech and producing it. This doesn’t have immediate application in therapy or treatment, for example for when the brain is injured by stroke, but it’s all about building up a good knowledge base that can inform later developments in clinical settings. For example, if one of my studies identifies the parts of the brain that are important in controlling the way we speak and changing our voice, this could have implications for types of speech therapy for people who want to speak ‘normally’ again after a brain injury that has affected their speech. Also, I know it sounds like science fiction, but if we think about all the amazing developments in science just over the last 50 years, it might not be that long until neurosurgery can repair brain injury… so I think everything we can do to understand how the brain functions in everyday tasks is definitely worthwhile.

      In the next year or so I will hopefully do some work with people who have received a cochlear implant (a type of hearing aid that is implanted in the inner ear). Adults who received a cochlear implant typically have very severe (‘profound’) hearing loss. We hope to do some neuroimaging experiments with people who have cochlear implants, to see how their brain responds to sounds and speech, and how the activity changes as they get better at using their implant to understand sounds in the environment. This has much more direct clinical relevance.

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      My work is mostly curiosity driven but I like to think it is a curiosity shared by lots of people. Specifically, I want to know just what it is about our brains that make us human and not just noisy, hairless apes. When we can fully answer this Q, we’ll be a long way towards knowing what makes us tick and that seems like a valuable thing to do.

    • Photo: Anne Seawright

      Anne Seawright answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      My work has a direct effect on the owners of animals with behaviour problems as I hopefully make their lives easier. It also has an effect on people who work in rescue shelters as they know how best to rehabilitate animals and of course it has a huge effect on many animals.

Comments