• Question: How would the results of your research be benefitial to society?

    Asked by laurenisfabby to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 18 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by Emily, epearson, thecrazyone, rachelwhitehead21.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi @laurenisfabby
      Thanks for your question. I think my research will benefit society. At the moment there is a lot of confusion about what drugs can do to you, even within the scientific community, so it would be really good to help to clear up the confusion, even a little bit.
      If cannabis really is bad for mental health then more help can be put in place to stop people using it, and if it isn’t then that will be good to know too, and perhaps the information available to the public can reflect this.

      Hope this answers your question 🙂

    • Photo: Rachael Ward

      Rachael Ward answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      An important question!

      My current work will hopefully help us understand more about how serotonin is controlled in the brain and this could be beneficial to society as, with more knowledge on this, we might be able to design better drugs to treat disorders that involve serotonin – such as depression, anxiety, aggression, and even insomnia.

      Before that, my work was studying spinal cord and looking for a treatment to reduce paralysis that people suffer after spinal cord injury. We found a drug that could do this and my old lab are doing more experiments on it, hoping to give it to people sometime in the future. If it works, that would be very beneficial to people.

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I hope my work could help society by giving people more information about attitudes. In my last job, I was working on a project about the effect that people’s attitudes had on the way they spoke, and we found that they did matter – particularly if you felt strongly that being Scottish was important to you, you would probably speak with a more Scottish accent than someone who was Scottish but didn’t care about it much. So it seems as if attitudes do matter to accent.

      So, if some humanitarian worker in a dangerous part of the world (say) took account of that and knew to be really careful what they said depending on which side of a border they were on, and that stopped someone from being really angry, I could have helped defuse a sticky situation! I hope, anyway.

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