• Question: how has being a scientist helped you in your life and how is it helping other people as well

    Asked by mnuttall123 to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Well, it makes me pretty happy because I have a job I love and lots of flexibility with it. And my whole life outside of work came from being a scientist. I have a fantastic wife and two excellent daughter through being a scientist (I met my wife through work). Plus, we’ve had amazing opportunities to travel through work. We’ve been to Hong King, Taiwan, Beijing, Singapore, Australia, the US, Canada and all over Europe given talks and meeting colleagues, which is pretty cool.

      My research doesn’t have a direct application — that is, it isn’t specifically designed to help people. Instead it is basic research about what makes the human brain specialized for language and I think it has two long term benefits. First, understanding how it is setup for language will greatly improve our understanding of how things go wrong in brain damage and how we might try to assist the recovery after a loss (like from a stroke). Second, if we understood what makes us unique as a species and what changes occurred in our evolution to make us unique, that would be fundamentally awesome because it tells us more about ourselves.

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Well obviously it has given me a job (which helps) and one that I enjoy because you feel like it is going somewhere. You get the results from one experiment, and hopefully what you learn from that helps you design more experiments, so as you go along you slowly unravel the “story” of what is happening in the brain. Theres also quite a high chance that it will lead to me working abroad at some point (like Joe who came over here from the states), which I would be keen to do.

      As for how it helps others? 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:

      That’s a nice question.

      Being a scientist has taught me a lot – obviously about the subjects I study and how to program and run experiments and analyses, but also about things like public speaking and defending my ideas. I feel very proud of my job and all the studying I’ve done, which has probably given me a bit of extra confidence in life. I’ve also had a lot of fun – my first trip to the US was through work, and I’ve had the chance to be part of events like this one! Overall, I feel very contented with my work, and when I see other people being driven into the ground by law firms and other jobs in the city, I am so glad that what I do is so interesting and full of inspiring people, even if it doesn’t pay much.

      I’ve written answers to some other questions on here about how my research might be relevant for the development of clinical therapies, even if that might not happen soon. But I guess there are also other people who might benefit from my work – my students. I do some lecturing for BSc and MSc students at UCL, and then I supervise individual students for their essays and research projects. It’s one of my favourite aspects of my job, and I always try my hardest to make my lectures fun and to put time aside for my essay/project students. If I can inspire those people to study neuroscience further, or just to stay interested in science after they graduate, then I see that as helping other people.

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Hi there. Being a scientist has helped my life by allowing me to have a job I enjoy (and to get paid for it!). The people I have helped so far as a scientist are the students that I have taught to. As my research so far has been on basic science (to understand how the brain works), it has no direct application to help people immediately.

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