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Asked by carmeen.06 to Tom, Paul, Natasha, Ildiko, Ester, Eoin on 7 Nov 2017.
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Ester Gil Vazquez answered on 7 Nov 2017:
Despite working on cancer, I think that infectious diseases may become again a major danger in the future. Bacteria evolve as time passes by, and some of them are becoming resistant to antibiotics.This means that if they infect you, there is no way of treating it with drugs! At the same time, it is getting more and more difficult to develop new antibiotics. In addition, climate change helps dangerous parasites (malaria) spread to areas that used to be colder. And viruses are not much better…it may seem a problem for the future scientists, but if we don’t start tackling it now we’ll be in trouble in the future. I will leave this task to pure immunologists though!
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Natasha Myhill answered on 8 Nov 2017:
That is a really interesting question! As I work in cancer research, I think that would be really important to solve what exactly causes it and how we could stop it, but there are so many other important things. Like Ester mentioned, antibiotic resistance is going to be a big problem in the future, but with an ageing population, diseases like Alzheimers and dementia are also really important to solve so that we can age more healthily.
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Ildiko Somorjai answered on 9 Nov 2017:
Super tricky question! I don´t think I can answer it to be perfectly honest. Some scientific problems are quite obvious to us as humans as being important-curing diseases is a great example. People outside of my field would say that if we don´t protect our planet and all its inhabitants (animals, plants, bacteria….) then we will have nowhere to live and so that should be our priority. I think that a lot of small, less obvious discoveries in Science can have a huge impact on us, even if it takes years to realise it. So I actually try really hard to keep an open mind-even if I don´t particularly find someone´s research interests interesting, or don´t understand them, they could be SUPER important and we just don´t know it yet!
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Paul McKeegan answered on 10 Nov 2017:
I think there are many good answers to this and probably some problems we cannot predict! It is tempting to echo the damage we are doing to our environment, I feel that we kind of know what to do about this, but we need certain countries to get on board with committing to renewable energy!
As a cell scientist, I am also very aware of health and disease. I worry that as a species, we are starting to pass on diseases like heart disease and diabetes to our children through our diet and environment, even if we do not pass on disease-causing genes. -
Eoin McKinney answered on 15 Nov 2017:
Its probably going to be how we deal with climate change and try to preserve the natural resources of the planet before we destroy ourselves
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