• Question: How does your work impact the world?

    Asked by Rosie to Alan, Ciorsdaidh, Lauren, Leonie, Martin, Neil, Shuo on 6 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      The work that our group does is to make new medicines for diseases in countries that cannot afford the treatment. However with climate change and people travelling all around the world, these diseases are now moving into our own home countries. Our group looks to kill these diseases. Have you heard of Malaria before? Maybe you heard out Cheryl Cole (who used to be from Girls Aloud), she got malaria from travelling on holiday. Our group make medicines to fight against diseases like this one. Just now we have a potential cure for Malaria in testing. How exciting!

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Well I design new catalysts to make chemicals. Without catalysts we can’t produce most of the chemicals that we need on a daily basis. So I’d say my work does impact on the world. However, it is important to realise that hundreds or thousands of scientists work in this area so its the collective effort of all that moves us forward 🙂

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      The work I do in the lab day-to-day is not going to change the world on it’s own… but it will help.
      My group develops new molecules that contain fluorine that can be used for a large number of different applications. At the moment, we’re making small molecules called motifs that could be joined together with other molecules to make drugs, agrochemicals, battery materials, liquid crystals or even tools to diagnose cancers. These ‘motifs’ contain fluorine atoms arranged around a 3 carbon ring (a cyclopropane), but mostly on one face (think of a flat triangle tying on a table – the fluorine atoms are sticking up on top of the table, and there are some hydrogen atoms under the table towards your feet). Having a separation between the negatively charged fluorines and the positively charged hydrogens creates two charged faces that can interact with positive and negative things separately. We are using this to make new interactions with molecules and also to see how our molecule responds to electric fields (for making better screens).

      We don’t make all of these final materials ourselves (we work with lots of other groups together), but our contribution to understanding how the properties of these molecules change when you add fluorine atoms helps the whole chemistry community across the world.

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