Question: how many experiments do you carry out each week? is it possible that in the distant future, all diseases will have a cure or may never happen again and if these disease are exterminated, could there be more disease that will be discovered?

Darren Logan answered on 2 Dec 2011:

Hi Dan,

I don’t carry out too many experiments myself anymore (maybe just two or three a week), but I spent a lot of my time helping my team do their experiments. Plus, many of our experiments are quite long term, as we record mice behaving over time. For example, we check how much food the mice eat, or how many times they mate in a month. This will tell us whether they are behaving slightly differently when a particular gene is removed from their genome, which is not always obvious if you only spend one day watching them. So a lot of behavioural science involves long term studies, which requires patience and attention to detail.

You second question is a really good one. I don’t think all diseases will ever be cured because with each generation new mutations in our genes apear (this is how evolution happens). These are often harmless, but sometimes they will cause a rare disease. There are lots of these rare diseases to be discovered still, and it will be very difficult to study them properly when only a few people around the world suffers from it. Therefore many of these will probably never be cured.

Other common diseases like cancer will also probably never be *completely* exterminated, but I believe within your lifetime (and hopefully mine!) we will have really great new treatments that mean far, far less people will die from it. I think genomic research will be largely responsible for these advances, which makes it a really exciting area to be involved in over the next 20 years.