Question: Is considering any environmental impact your work might cause a priority to you?

Christopher Blanford answered on 14 Mar 2016:

Hi,

Yes, increasingly so! Great question!

The term we use is ‘life cycle analysis’, which aims to capture all the costs (money, societal and environmental) of a particular product or method. So it’d be great if we could all have battery-powered electric cars, but if it means destroying a desert to get all the lithium we need, and poisoning the land, then that changes whether it’s truly greener.

The same thing applies to a lot of what I do. I don’t know anyone who’s looked at how ‘green’ some of the enzyme work we’re doing actually is. It’s hard, because lab work is always pretty wasteful, but we need to look at what the impact would be if some of the technology were rolled out for a thousand, million or billion people.

Chris