• Question: has your work made any significant to the world

    Asked by skaterman1 to Norman, Laura, Nicola, Sandra, Thanasis on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by brakeyjess1dx, gooseberry007.
    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 12 Mar 2013:


      Yes I think it has.

      A lot of my work is for thinking of new ways of doing things, so one thing I did was to think of a new way of finding out how big ancient animal’s brains were. The size of an animal’s brain is linked to lots of important things that you can’t tell otherwise from a fossil, like how much energy it used, whether it was warm blooded, or how long it looked after its babies for. This seems like a small thing but now I can use it to figure out things about lots of ancient animals then we can understand evolution better, and why those species might have gone extinct.

      I’ve only just started the job that I’m doing at the moment though, so there are lots of things that I’m working on that aren’t finished yet, but when they are finished they will help us to know which species of animals are most likely to go extinct so that we can try to save them. Scientists before me have shown that its really important to try to keep lots of different animals from going extinct, because it can affect humans, and also things like climate change, it’s all part of the same big system. So in the future I hope that the work I am doing now will be significant to the world because it will help us to understand evolution and extinction better.

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 12 Mar 2013:


      Yes, it has made some important contributions I think. I have helped the Ugandan Government to control a deadly disease called sleeping sickness by using maps and spatial analysis. I showed them that the disease was spreading through the country because people were moving cows which also had the disease…then it got out of the cows and infected people. This helps them work out how to stop people getting infected and how to stop it spreading further. What they need to do is to prevent infected animals from being moved around. It’s not that easy though, so there are still people catching the disease, but hopefully the information I gave them has prevented some people from getting the disease.

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 12 Mar 2013:


      Hugely yes.

      Cervical screening has saved the lives of millions of women.

      Cervical cancer is the 2nd most commonest cancer in women world wide.

      5th most common cancer in women

      and the 11th most commonest cause of cancer deaths in the UK.

      Something like 4 million women are screened each year, and under 1000 women actually die from cervical cancer. Screening works, and we inthe UK are known to have the best screening programme in the world.

      Also with my other discipline of histology – that has made a huge difference in the world, every day hundreds of thousands of people are cured of their disease or able to have treatment for their disease because pathology diagnosed it in the first place.

      Pathology and biomedical scientists saves lives, no doubt about that.

      Some of those lives saved include my dad, my mum, my brother, both of my children, my husband-to-be and many other people I know.

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