• Question: have you ever cured a disease?

    Asked by jorjahh to Alastair, Emma, Hywel, Keith, Vicki on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Hywel Vaughan

      Hywel Vaughan answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Again I have to say afraid not – my expertise are a lot more technical than biological…

    • Photo: Alastair Sloan

      Alastair Sloan answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Not yet, but am working on it!

    • Photo: Keith Brain

      Keith Brain answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I have prescribed drugs that have cured a disease, but I’ve never invented a cure myself … except … We did some works on a chemotherapy drug (used for treating cancers) called oxaliplatin. Oxaliplatin has bad side effects, like killing a lot of your nerves, and we wanted to work out why. We found that if you added in a drug usually used to treat epilepsy (the drug is called carbamazepine), then you could prevent the nerve damage. So, we found that adding carbamazepine helps stop the toxic effects of oxaliplatin, so I suppose that that is an example of harm prevention.

    • Photo: Vicki Stevenson

      Vicki Stevenson answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Hi
      Although many people assume that scientist are medical, there are lots of other areas of science.
      I don’t work in a medical field, so I’ve never cured a disease. However, scientists who are trying to find alternatives to fossil fuels (like me) will hopefully help us avoid the worst effects of climate change, so we could still end up saving lives!

    • Photo: Emma Carter

      Emma Carter answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      No I haven’t but I think that would be a really cool thing to do – maybe one day if I move into bio-medical engineering

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