• Question: do you have any ambitions to make a cure for any critical illness's

    Asked by 374medb54 to Clare, Glafkos, Paul, Samantha on 8 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by hairy lollipop :)), Megan.
    • Photo: Clare Devery

      Clare Devery answered on 8 Mar 2015:

      Hi 🙂
      Great question! As a scientist working in medicine, certainly curing illness is one of the main aims of our work.
      Right now I’m working on some research that will hopefully allow doctors to gather more useful information from cardiac MRI scans. A doctor can tell from looking at a heart scan what areas of the tissue are diseased and what areas are healthy. They base their treatment decisions on what they see in the images, but at the minute this process relies solely on what the doctor sees. The work we are doing will hopefully allow us to assign numbers to the scans before doctors view them. We aim to be able to say something like “3% of the myocardium of the heart you are looking at is scar tissue.” Being able to put a definite number such as the 3% quoted above on the scan will hopefully make the diagnosis and subsequent treatment much easier and more reliable than current methods.

      So while I doubt I’ll ever be developing some wonder drug to cure disease (I’ll leave that to the chemists!) I hope that the work I am doing will have an impact, even if the impact is rather indirect.

    • Photo: Glafkos Havariyoun

      Glafkos Havariyoun answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Due to the nature of the career and subject I have chosen no. But i am hoping to affect critical illness’s in other ways!

      How?

      Well my belief is that if you don’t know that the illness is there you will not cure it!
      So my aim is in improving medical imaging so that we can see things that we can’t! Then when we know that a patient has that illness we can use the cure the chemists created to treat them!

    • Photo: Samantha Terry

      Samantha Terry answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      I believe most scientists in the medical world have that ambition, but it is impossible to think that one person alone will be able to do that. Science is all about team work. The closest I think we can get minimizing risk of illnesses and diagnosing it as early as possible so as to treat is as best we can.

    • Photo: Paul Booker

      Paul Booker answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      I would love to but my job isn’t really about finding cures but helping make sure people get the best radiotherapy treatment for their cancer. There are only a few ways to cure cancer at the moment (for example radiotherapy, surgery and chemotherapy) so finding another cure is a big ask! My role is more about making sure the current treatment we can give is as good as it can be.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      I don’t have any ambitions to cure critical illnesses. However, I do hope my work with spectroscopy with help to aid and prognosis of different diseases.

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