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Asked by thebeatles to Simone, Carys, Chris, Jeremy, Katherine on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by delanahastings.
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Carys Cook answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Exellent question – researching climate change is of the utmost importance to our society and species, and all life on Earth in fact. The more we understand about how our actions affect the Earth, the more we know what in our behaviour needs to be changed. It is not known how bad climate change will get, but many peoples lives will be affected!
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Katherine Jones answered on 16 Jun 2011:
I research into making new medicines for diseases that there aren’t good treatments for at the moment. At the moment we are trying to make a medicine for a type of cancer that affects young people in their 20’s and 30’s. I hope that we will be successful – it would be really amazing to be able to help these people.
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Jeremy Green answered on 16 Jun 2011:
My research is very basic so that I expect no direct benefits for quite a few years. But the work I did 15-20 years ago is part of the basis of two medical trials that are going on right now. One is to repair the spinal cords of paraplegics so they can (hopefully) get some sensation and/or even movement back in their legs. The other is to treat a progressive form of blindness called macular degeneration. Like all medical trials, they may not work, although I am confident that something like them will work in the reasonably near future. It is only a small exaggeration to say that my research may help the lame walk and the blind see. That feels good.
My current research is about how structures are made. If we are one day going to repair complicated things like faces, kidneys or lungs, then perhaps my research will enable us to understand how to go about it. -
Christopher Phillips answered on 17 Jun 2011:
How does astronomy benefit society… hmm? 🙂
Well without astronomy and space science we would not know we lived on a planet orbiting a star.
we would not know that we live in a beautiful galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars.
There would be no space exploration.. no satellites, no mobile phones, GPS, microwave ovens, medical imaging devices, no digital cameras, no mp3, no broadband internet.All the things I mentioned above have roots in the science of space exploration and astronomy.
The most important thing of all though is this… if we want to survive as a species we NEED to learn about the universe because one day our sun will die and we will have to find another place to live. That is how important space science is. It determines whether our whole race lives or becomes extinct like the dinosaurs… that’s pretty important.. don’t you think?
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Simone Bijvoet answered on 17 Jun 2011:
Child development is important to study so we can understand better how things that happen when you are young can affect you when you get older. At the moment, a lot of research in child development is focused on problems that are mainly seen in children, like autism and ADHD. By understanding how these problems occur, how they affect children’s daily living and what happens to these kids when they get older, we can also try and find a way to make it easier for these kids.
For example, research on autistic children has revealed that those kids have a lot of problems with social communication. At first it may seem that those children are rude, or annoying because they won’t look at you when you speak to them, or they all of the sudden will walk away from you when you are speaking to them. In reality there is just something different going on in their brain which makes it hard for them to understand how we should behave in certain situations or they have trouble taking in all the information around them and that upsets them. Because of the research done so far we can now develop special programs for autistic children that will teach them in a way they can understand how to behave in social situations. In this way they will be better able to stay in normal schools and have a better way of living. For me that is something very rewarding.
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