• Question: So why have you choosen this project . why not something diffrent ?. :D .

    Asked by aliishaaleiighfarrley to Claire, Greg, Jane, Jo, Nuruz, Vicki on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by wehatetractors, krieb.
    • Photo: Jo Broadbent

      Jo Broadbent answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      A good question! I work on long term health conditions like heart disease and circulatory disease because they are the biggest causes of early death in the area where I work. But research has shown that lots of people have these diseases (e.g. high blood pressure) but don’t know it.

      Its really easy to test people’s blood pressure though. And there are treatments that work really well to lower blood pressure. These medicines don’t cost a lot of money and have few bad side effects. So its a good way to help lots of people be more healthy and to live longer.

      And because the medicines are cheap, there should be money left over to help more other people with other health problems too. One way to look at my job is that its about working out how the most people can be helped to be more healthy for the amount of money available. Its about getting good value from public money. (V important with the size of the national deficit at the moment!)

      Jo

      Jo

    • Photo: Greg FitzHarris

      Greg FitzHarris answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Good question,
      Well, my training is in egg biology…. ive been working on eggs for ten years. Whilst its possible for me to decide that I want to work on, say, nerve cells for example (lots of important questions there)… it would take a long time to become as good with nerve cels as I am with eggs.

      Within the egg-world, so to speak, there are lots of interesting questions also. I picked this one because i think women being able to have kids when they are older willl become more and more imporant in the future. Also, I like the type of experiments (lots of looking down the microscope at fluorescently labelled cells) – i particularly like watching ce;lls divide which is important in working our how egggs keep the correct number of chromosomes…

    • Photo: Claire O'Donnell

      Claire O'Donnell answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I din’t really choose the project, it chose me. When I began it wasn’t clear what sort of treatments the NHS should offer to people with fertility problems. My job is to analyse research findings and decide whether new treatments work well and how likely they are to work on all the different people who might want to use them so that’s why I began to work on fertility. IVF is the most complicated fertility treatment but there are others.
      At the beginning I looked at how effective the treatments were and whether they worked well in everybody or whether they were more likely to result in a baby for some people and not in others.
      After that we had to try to decide whether there were other things to consider as well. In most parts of the country you can only have IVF if you as a couple don’t have any children and in some areas neither of you can have any children from a previous relationship either.
      We came up with some suggestions and then did something called a public consultation to see what people thought. In this you ask everyone you can think of (and get them to ask anyone they can think of too) for comments. The interesting thing for me is that everyone’s opinion on this is just as important as anyone elses – you don’t need to be an ‘expert’. We heard lots of opinions, many of them were similar to the ones that you’ve been reading in your packs.

    • Photo: Vicki Onions

      Vicki Onions answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Well, i knew i wanted to do research and knew i wanted to do it in something “useful” and to me that meant something in human health/wellbeing. But my degree was in animal sciences and i’m not medically trained. However one of my lecturers at university was one of the scientists involved in the earlier work freezing ovarian tissue strips in sheep (he was in the group that got the first lamb born from a previously frozen peice of ovarian tissue) and he was keen to develop this work and so organised for a PhD in this – i thought it sounded right up my street – using both my animal science degree but related to human medicine and so i applied and the rest is history!

    • Photo: Nuruz Jaman

      Nuruz Jaman answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      to educate children and to show them the fun side of science and the fact that science can broaden your horizons and give you the opportunity to work in exciting fields and change lives.

Comments