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Asked by Shri PC to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 15 Jun 2015.
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Rebecca Dewey answered on 15 Jun 2015:
Scientifically life changing – wow – do you mean *my* life? Or lives *generally*? Or one other person’s life?
I’ve tried out some brain scanning techniques on people and have been able to see differences in their brains in a whole new way, and that may have been life changing for them. I’ve seen patients with brain conditions that from their brain scan it looks like they really shouldn’t be alive but they are walking and talking and essentially fine. I guess this really highlights how adaptable and flexible the brain is. It learns to deal with what it’s got and does its best to survive at all costs.
I found that using a drug you can change which areas of the brain respond to an emotional stimulus. When taking a drug called a beta-blocker (used for lowering blood pressure), people used less of the emotion-processing parts of the brain to process distressing or emotional pictures. This might mean that we could treat someone who has had a trauma or a distressing thing happen to them by giving them this drug and that they might remember the incident with less emotion and they may be more able to get on with their lives and not develop post traumatic stress disorder or the like.
I found that in people who have grown up profoundly-deaf and not able to hear a thing, the auditory cortex (the part of the brain that usually processes sound) can learn to do other tasks instead, such as process pictures or touch sensations. We’re hoping to be able to use this to understand why some deaf people do really well with treatment and others don’t do quite as well.
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Susan Cartwright answered on 15 Jun 2015:
To be honest, I wouldn’t say anything I have done has been “scientifically life-changing”. I think many people have this image of scientists leaping up from their apparatus and running down the corridor shouting “Eureka!” It’s not really like that: a lot of scientists spend their time quietly making slow, gradual progress in understanding – lots of moments of quiet satisfaction rather than great big “Eureka!” events.
In fact, even great big discoveries need not be life-changing. When I worked in California, I knew a guy called Marty Perl, who was one of the senior scientists in the collaboration I belonged to. I wouldn’t say he was a personal friend, but he was a work colleague – if I saw him in the cafeteria I’d go over and sit with him, that kind of thing. He was a really nice guy.
About 10 years before I met him, Marty Perl discovered the tau lepton. This was a really, really big discovery: it was totally unexpected, it changed the shape of the (then new) Standard Model of particle physics, and it was pretty much single-handed – Marty had to fight his collaborators quite hard to get them to accept that this was really a new particle and not just a problem with their detector.
I don’t think it changed Marty’s life at all. He was already well established in a senior post at SLAC when he made the discovery – he was then about 50 – and although I imagine he got more invitations to talk at conferences, it didn’t really affect his work or his life. He eventually won the Nobel Prize for it, but it was one of those Nobel Prizes that are awarded long after the event, when the committee realises it’s screwed up – he got it in 1995, nearly 20 years after the discovery (but that pales into insignificance compared with the guy he shared it with: Fred Reines, getting a prize for discovering the neutrino FORTY YEARS after the event). The prize money for the Nobel isn’t insignificant, but it’s not huge – it’s about a million pounds, which was shared in this instance: much less than a typical jackpot on the lottery, for instance – and Marty was 68 when he got it, so I suspect it probably got passed on to his family (he died last year, at the age of 87).
The really life-changing thing to have come out of particle physics in my lifetime wasn’t a discovery at all. It was a software tool written by a guy in CERN’s computing division to help big international collaborations to share documents and data more effectively. It became the World Wide Web. Now that really has changed the lives of literally millions if not billions of people – and it wasn’t a discovery at all, it was just intended to make the lives of particle physicists a bit easier.
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Chris Armstrong answered on 15 Jun 2015:
I don’t think I have found anything “life changing” in that global sense so far, and given my field I can’t imagine I will down the line, though having NDT being wide spread in industry could dramatically reduce the chance that faulty machinery makes it into the public.
I have however learnt from personal experience that a touching a penny on top of a plasma ball will give you a nasty shock. I still do it to this day, so I don’t think that’s actually changed anything.. I should learn faster…
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Josh Meyers answered on 15 Jun 2015:
So far I haven’t found anything life changing. Hopefully I have contributed in some small way to the advancement of science in general and I am proud of that.
Contrary to what the newspapers often shout. Science isn’t a world of ‘great breakthroughs’. We gently nudge the frontiers of knowledge each day in the hope of gaining a greater understanding of our world.
One day I’ll cure cancer though.
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