• Question: If you could make one discovery what would it be?

    Asked by torbz2000 to Debbie, Glyn, Jon, Kat, Nicola on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by mollybacon.
    • Photo: Jonathan Stone

      Jonathan Stone answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      It would be some kind of cool volcano monitoring gadget, that took all of the different bits of scientific information from all of the different types of monitoring…before combining it together. At the moment volcanologists do that in their heads…but in the future we may be able to fully combine all of the information automatically.

    • Photo: Debbie Crockard

      Debbie Crockard answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      hmmmm a hard question, I would love to discover a way to fish really selectively (being able to pick and choose what you catch) – in my work I have to represent the fish and the environment when it comes to the government and asking for conservation.

      But I find it really difficult when I know that the fishermen are trying really hard to make sure that they are ensuring the future of their fisheires as well and trying to make a living and yet things out side their control means that they have how much they are allowed to catch cut.

      It is a difficult position to be in when you want to conserve the environment but you also don’t want people to loose their jobs!

      Thats why I try to balance it out as much as I can and sometines I win and sometimes I don’t but being able to fish selectively would change that in favour of the fish and the fishermen!

    • Photo: Glyn Barrett

      Glyn Barrett answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I would like to find a super bacteria which could be used to clean up pollution on our planet.
      There is so much pollution everywhere, in the soil, in the ocean, in the rivers – everywhere.
      And much of this pollution comes from chemicals and oil which big companies produce and throw away.

      There is a good way of cleaning up all this mess which is disastrous to animals and ourselves. It is called bioremediation which basically means ‘cleaning with biology’ and uses bacteria to break down the nasty chemicals.

      Heres a link to a very informative video on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

      Sorry for the strange American accents.

      Anyways I am currently working towards finding some bacteria which could be used for cleaning up pollution in soil. Fingers crossed I find something.
      He might even look like this. Now that would be fun 🙂

    • Photo: Nicola Fletcher

      Nicola Fletcher answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I’d like to discover a way to use viruses to cure infections that are caused by bacteria, so that we wouldn’t have to use antibiotics so much. There are loads of problems with using antibiotics now because lots of the bacteria are ‘resistant’, meaning that the antibiotics don’t always kill the bacteria and that means people don’t get better. But there are these really cool viruses called phages that only infect bacteria which means that they might be able to be used as medicines for bacterial infections. The phages look absolutely amazing, like little spaceships…check out a picture of them here: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/bacteriophage-t4-virus-group-2-russell-kightley.html

    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I’ve been thinking about this all day. I think it would be a way make to make brain cancers stop growing. The ones we work on are really hard to treat. If you try to remove them, you might give the patient brain damage and they also spread through the brain really easily. Drugs to treat them don’t get into the brain very well, because there is a thin barrier between the blood (where drugs are carried) and the brain). Many of these patients only live for a few months, so if we could give them even an extra year of life it would make a huge difference.

Comments