• Question: if you were to study any topic in science what would you do ?

    Asked by georgina2 to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I would still study the brain, but I would do things a bit differently; at present I have to bid for money from the government (actually the Research Councils) to pay for the people and equipment I need to carry out the research. This means I have to focus on small problems that can be solved in a few years. Other scientists will read my proposal and the other proposals and decide who gets the money. So I have to think of ideas they will think are sensible and straightforward. If it weren’t for these limitations, I would probably work on bigger and more challenging problems which other scientists might think are a bit wacky. Basically I’d like to develop a very crude model of how the brain works – the outside of the brain, the wrinkly bit you see in pictures, is called the cortex. Different parts of the cortex do different things, but they are (in my view) remarkably similar in structure. So I think there are probably some simple rules and principles that govern how the different functions are laid out in the cortex, and I’d like to discover what these principles are, even if only very roughly. The alternative, that each part of the cortex is a separate chunk (they call them “modules”) has a special set of instructions which set it up to do a specific task, seems too complex for me to believe in, but it seems the most popular view at the moment.

    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I would do particle physics because to me that is the most interesting topic! I love it. I am fascinated by the particles and forces that make up our universe and I feel so lucky to be able to study a part of that.

    • Photo: Steve Roser

      Steve Roser answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I’m going to answer this is a very unfair way. If I was given a time machine, I would like to travel back to 1905 and study quantum mechanics. This might seem a little weird, but this was a quite fantastic time, when the world changed an amazing amount in one year -in arts as well as sciences. The whole world of science was thrown on its head by the ideas that were floating around then, and i would love to have been part of that (especuially because i could have looked really smart knowing what happened in the next 100 years…)
      If you won’t let me have a time machine, but would let me retrain completely, I think the next few years are going to be incredibly exciting in the field of artificial life. The idea that you can write a genomes worth of DNA and whack it into a cell has such incredible implications that there is so much to do…..

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi Georgina, I think I’m already working in the area that interests me most: investigating the structure and mechanism of tiny molecular machines known as proteins, in particular ones that below to viruses.

      if I was starting out again I think I would have studied chemistry for a bit longer (I didn’t do A level chemistry) because I struggle to understand some chemical concepts these days that would be useful for my work.

      I studied French instead. C’est la vie!

Comments