• Question: does your research save lives

    Asked by anon-247037 to Megan, Katherine, Jesse, Dave, AJ, Amelia on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Arjuna James

      Arjuna James answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      The short answer is no. The long answer is that the study of planetary atmospheres will be very important if/when humans move to another planet, so if in the future the Earth becomes doomed and we need to move home, my research could potentially help to save lives. (A lot of ifs!)

    • Photo: Jesse Dykes

      Jesse Dykes answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      Probably not to be honest. It will improve them, and there’s some implementations like self-driving cars where my work would make sensors more reliable in the rain and fog, but it’s not directly going to save any lives. After all, if you couldn’t see in the rain, you just wouldn’t go out in it. But this will definitely make some things easier, and that’s enough for me

    • Photo: Amelia Edwards

      Amelia Edwards answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Not at the moment, my research is not directly related to saving lives. But the technology we develop here at CERN is used to design machines which are used to treat cancer in humans.

    • Photo: Megan Maunder

      Megan Maunder answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Directly, probably not. However, Space Weather is a huge international threat and the long-term applications of work like mine in forecasting, should help mitigate consequences of large events which may have consequences to life.

    • Photo: Katherine Graves

      Katherine Graves answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      It has the potential to save the lives of a lot of animals by reducing the amount of plastic waste, however that is a long way off from happening as I’m currently only using 1g of plastic at a time in my experiments.

    • Photo: Dave Constable

      Dave Constable answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      At the moment, not directly.

      In the past, I have done some research on particle accelerators which would be used for cancer treatment in Africa. The project was to design a cheap, but reliable treatment facility which would hopefully be able to reach lots of people across all of the continent. I changed research from particle accelerators to planetary science, but the work is still ongoing.

Comments