• Question: Has anything you’ve done been used?

    Asked by Tim to Sajid, Katherine, Jayne, Duncan, anuantony on 10 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jayne Ede

      Jayne Ede answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      At my place of work the whole point is for us to come up with useful technology. Some of my colleagues have made protective suits, or hand-held detectors for detecting dangerous chemicals, or new materials for ships and planes, or vaccines for diseases.

      In my field, we usually do experiments which inform the military of the best choice of action. For example, if a new piece of equipment needs testing to see how good it is at absorbing chemical spills, we’ll come up with loads of experiments to test all the different choices, and help them decide on the best one.

      We do also do really ‘pie in the sky’ research though, which we don’t necessarily think will get used for a long time – like making new chemicals to destroy dangerous ones. But the hope is that when I’m gone, someone else will build on what I’ve done. We have to start somewhere!

    • Photo: Duncan McNicholl

      Duncan McNicholl answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      No, and some days I’m really happy about that, because I realise that I’ve been doing it wrong for months and months and months! Hopefully what I’m doing now will be useful at some point, but to get it to work right now I need a really neat, well-controlled lab, and that isn’t the sort of thing that you can have in a hospital because of all the sick people. Cleverer people than me will be needed to get from my research to something useful.

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