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Asked by mrwetwipe on 4 Jun 2018.
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Claire Donald answered on 4 Jun 2018:
Every scientist hopes that their work will benefit society! But it really depends what you are working on and what stage the research is at. My work is currently on the Zika virus. This virus was largely unknown when it caused a large outbreak in Brazil in 2015 so myself and other scientists needed to work very quickly to understand some of the most basic things about it. This research might not directly benefit people immediately but we need that information to benefit us in the future. My work will influence how we develop efficient vaccines and antiviral drugs but these can take many years before they can be used in a clinic.
My PhD work also involved studying mosquitoes and their immune response. This doesn’t sound like it would help anyone but by understanding how the mosquito responds to a virus infection could influence how we stop them spreading viruses. And we would all benefit from that!
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Nathan Clarke answered on 4 Jun 2018:
Great question 🙂 This very much depends on what you view as being beneficial to society. There’s a popular myth that the benefits of science come from big “Eureka!” type moments (like the idea that Isaac Newton discovered gravity after an apple fell on his head). In fact, good science is about drilling down to the truth of things we care about using the tools and methods that science provides. It’s more like putting a complex puzzle of the big picture together, where every scientist is bringing their own little piece. I think seeing how my little piece of the puzzle fits with the rest will benefit society by helping people impacted by tinnitus, as well as adding to our scientific understanding of the mind.
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Joey Shepherd answered on 4 Jun 2018:
Yes definitely, and I think we all believe that as well. Although there is value in scientific reserach just for the sake of finding things out, ultimately that knowledge will probably go to benefit society in one way or another. My team’s work is easy to answer that with though, our work is translational which means we are making and testing devices and actual products that will benefit society – for example, you may have heard about antibiotic resistance – bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotic drugs faster than we can develop new antibiotics so we need to find new ways to stop them. We are making new materials that kill bacteria or prevent infections without using antibiotics.
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Claudia Bonfio answered on 5 Jun 2018:
I agree with the others, we all would hope that our research could be beneficial =)
Even what I am doing, that is trying to create in the lab life from scratch, could be useful in terms of possible applications (for example, building something that produces energy, or that solves the problem of global warming). But also it could give us a hint to understand if life is possible on other planets… that would be amazing! -
Camille Parsons answered on 5 Jun 2018:
Brilliant question! Everyone that works in research, does so in the hope of changing society and I’m sure even in the smallest way every scientist does benefit society. For me, one area of work we are currently looking at is to do with a strategy to help identify older adults who may have weak bones and help strengthen their bones before they break a bone. Results from a experiment show that the strategy to identify these people worked and the group of women we studied for 5 years were less likely to break their bones. With a little more research this could be a strategy that the NHS adopts, and so society would benefit from fewer broken bones.
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Ashley Akbari answered on 5 Jun 2018:
Adding to some of the answer above – i think every researcher aims to make sure their work will have an impact and benefit as many people as possible.
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Laura Hemming answered on 6 Jun 2018:
I’d like to think that my research can benefit people! My research aims to find out whether suicide and aggression in prisoners is related to how people deal with their emotions. If we find that these two things are related then we would hope to develop a therapy which aims to help people deal better with their emotions. This would hopefully reduce the rates of suicide and aggression in prisoners. This would obviously help the prisoners themselves, but would also benefit prison staff as there would be less burden on them, the friends and families of prisoners, and also the taxpayer – prison suicide and aggression is expensive!
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Lauren Burns answered on 11 Jun 2018:
I agree with my colleagues, I am pretty sure everyone feels their research will benefit society. I am hoping to understand more about how misdiagnoses and treatment errors of mental health diagnoses occur. I believe that this research is very important to society as people with mental health problems are vulnerable, and misdiagnoses and mistakes in their treatment exacerbates their problems, and worsens their quality of life. Hopefully, my research will be able to reduce these mistakes and potentially improve the lives of these people 🙂
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