Question: What makes you want to tell children about cancer?

Sarah Thomas answered on 16 Mar 2011:

Well lots of reasons…

1) It is a really scary subject and sometimes adults don’t want to talk about it and this means that kids can end up with a lot of questions that no one answers. If someone gets cancer in their family like their granny for example, the adults don’t want to upset them so they say that granny is fine but then the kids can see that she is poorly and then what if she gets chemo and her hair falls out? I think that a lot of adults don’t explain to the kids what is happening or why.

2) The worst and most deadly cancers in this country are caused by people being unhealthy. Lung cancer is the highest in the UK and 85% of cases are caused by smoking. I think that if we teach people about cancer when they are younger, they will hopefully try to be healthy and reduce their risk of getting it. Like by not smoking, not drinking too much, not sun tanning obessively and being active and eating healthy.

3) When I started doing workshops in schools, they were about bacteria. But when the kids found out about my research, all the questions they asked me were about cancer. So I thought that this must mean that kids want to know more about it, so I decided to make my workshop about cancer research.

4) i also want to encourage more kids to be interested in science and think about going to uni to study chemistry, biology or physics. We are struggling to get scientists in the UK because kids think science is boring and ok, sometimes it can be boring, but we need scientists, it is such an important job!