Question: why should young people get into science

Paul Matusz answered on 5 Nov 2018:

I think we are living in some of the most exciting – but also some of the most dangerous – times. Many diseases like AIDS are being progressively cured, we are finding more and more novel mechanisms to fight different types of cancer, and finally we are getting closer to understanding how we can protect the quality of our thinking in the old age. We are capable of doing so because scientists are going across their narrow fields in which they did many or all of their degrees (for example, like me, I studied psychology to understand how people pay attention to visual and audio-visual information) and go into almost completely new fields for them – to find new ways of better understanding the brain and memory from the point of view of how they function in everyday situations (for me – learning how to do sophisticated novel analyses on such “old” methods to study brain activity like EEG – electroencephalography, so that I can be better understand how healthy and not healthy kids learn information in the outside world). So science is getting more and more complex and focused on problems (cancer, memory loss, other specific diseases) and less on scientific fieldds (psychology, biology, biochemstry) – we need motivated young people to want to integrate all those different areas of science to realise the full potential of medicine, and find new ways of treating the biggest health problems we are dealing with as humans – obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, etc. More generally, we need young people to help existing scientists to fight the dangerous changes linked to climate change – we wont’ tackle it on our own, it needs generations of aware, motivated young scientists!