• Question: why do you feel so strongly about your topic?

    Asked by 10darcya to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by leahyates, tessiebear, scarletti0611.
    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I guess its partly because I find it so fascinating – evolution is amazing, understanding how we came to exist, or how life came to exist at all. It’s also partly because I feel strongly that we need to look after our planet and a really big part of that is going to be understanding how life will change in the future and how we can prevent extinctions, to understand that we need to understand how and why life changed in the past, in the whole of its history, and I’m glad that my topic of research is contributing to that.

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Firstly, I find the diseases really interesting – the way the organisms cause the disease in people is really complex and amazing and it boggles my brain to think about how awesome it is.

      But at the same time, the effects on the people are really bad – they can kill people, make their legs swell up, make them blind or all sorts of other nasty things. So I think it is really important that we try to learn as much as we can about these diseases so that we can have a better change of getting rid of them in the future.

      I always thought this way, but when I first visited Kenya for fieldwork, I saw someone with a disease called elephantiasis. This is caused by a small worm and it causes peoples legs (and sometimes their private parts) to swell up massively, so they can’t really walk, or work. There is no cure for someone once they reach that stage of disease – they just have to live with it. It made me really sad that there was nothing to be done for him, but it made me more determined to try and help with disease control and made me feel even more strongly that I was on the right career path for me.

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I love medicine, and science. But people get sick and they die. And if I can do a little bit of something to try and stop people dying of a disease that could have been prevented, or treated early enough then I should. My topic helps people to not die needlessly, it helps people to get treatment if they need it before anything has the chance to turn nasty.

      Not only can some people die if they don’t have screening or any treatment, but it might affect their fertilty. They might have to have radical treatment which will leave them unable to have children.

      But in my other lab area people might have other diseases and dont know it until they go to the GP, then they have pathology tests and we can help the doctors to determine what is the best course of treatment to either cure them or make their condition managable.

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