• Question: Does your work help to protect the worlds environment or, help to make it a better place to live?

    Asked by HermioneSykes to Angela, Claire, Ian, Robert, Sarah on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by lollypop12, unicorn-rainbow#, karmakid_, rhiannay101, DORRON.
    • Photo: Angela Stokes

      Angela Stokes answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Hi HermioneSykes
      Fabulous question. I think most people care about saving our planet for those who will come after us.

      When we licence new medicines we have to work out what the body does to the medicine when a person takes it so we know what is passed out of the body when you go to the toilet. This is part of what the study of pharmacology is about.

      Your body breaks down a medicine into smaller molecules called metabolites, these pass out of your body and will go into sewerage works. It is important that we know how much is going into the sewerage system and we do this by estimating how many people will be using the medicine at any time so we can estimate the waste metabolites that are being produced. We then write an environmental effects paper and this is part of the documentation we need to licence a drug.

      When a health authority assessor looks at a drug this is part of the overall risk / benefit decision, so we do try and protect the environment.

      Of course new medicines do help make the world a better place to live as we are looking to produce new medicines to relieve suffering for both humans and animals, and there are so many diseases that still have no effective treatment.

    • Photo: Sarah Harris

      Sarah Harris answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Unfortunately I’m not really involved in that field 🙁 At my work I am usually working on websites or on projects for our members (who are professional bodies). However, some of our members looks at environmental issues – for example the Chartered Institution of Water & Environmental Management, or the Institution of Environmental Scientists, who all help scientists that do work to protect the world’s environment.

      I’ve also edited a couple of articles on Future Morph to promote environmental careers (which you can look at here http://www.futuremorph.org/?s=environment), so I guess in a roundabout way I am helping a bit!

    • Photo: Ian Cade

      Ian Cade answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      hmm… No, not at all.

      If the volumes of waste organic solvents my lab produces are anything to go by, the environment is probably not improved/protected by what I do (When I worked in Australia, some of this waste was sent to be burnt in furnaces to heat limestone to make concrete, but other materials (the chlorinated solvents) were simply burnt).

      But if you are a synthetic chemist, and need to borylate an aromatic compound, an alkene or an alkyne (as you might if you were making new drugs, polymers, materials etc) then my work on very electrophilic borenium systems probably will make your life easier.

      This may eventually trickle down, to make the world a better place in which to live, in terms of marginally cheaper/easier to produce compounds.

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