• Question: What is your Least favourite thing about being a scientist? do you think we could ever find a cure for all diseases?

    Asked by anon-186306 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 11 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      My least favourite thing about being a scientist is when experiments don’t work. I happens all the time. As it is research, we don’t know the answers yet….so we don’t know if an experiment will work. Sometimes it can give weird unexpected results or no results at all! This means there is sometimes a lot of trial and error involved.
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      I think it would be near impossible due to the sheer number of microbes and diseases out there. I do think we can get pretty close with curing the major diseases that affect humanity right now though. There are a lot of great scientists around the world working on disease research so our understanding of the field grows everyday. Maybe we will see lots of diseases affecting the world today wiped out in our lifetime!

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      There’s a large pressure to publish research papers, and it’s difficult to avoid comparing yourself to others who are doing better than you are! And because you care so much about science, it can make people get very down. I think this competitiveness is what I like least!
      I don’t think we will find a cure for all diseases – I think evolution is too clever for that. Even if we find cures for all the diseases we know now, new ones will appear! Also, it doesn’t matter if we have cures if everybody can’t have them – for example at the moment, we have a really good treatment for HIV, but so many people with HIV can’t get access to it so they still pass the virus on to their loved ones/

    • Photo: Trystan Leng

      Trystan Leng answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      My least favourite thing about being a scientist is the amount of computer coding I have to do. I work from my computer, and use simulations on my computer to do experiments, so I have to spend a lot of time coding up these simulations. However, its not something I really enjoy!

      I don’t think we could ever find a cure for all diseases. Infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms, and new infectious diseases could occur from microorganisms evolving. So to get rid of all infectious diseases, I think we would have to get rid of all microorganisms. But many microorganisms don’t cause diseases, and some are really useful! So even if we could do that, I don’t think we would want to.

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