• Question: What is the most interesting thing you have researched?

    Asked by 677epdj29 to Kevin, Liz, Beccy, Rosie on 12 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      Prion diseases are really interesting biologically. They aren’t caused by a bacteria or a virus or a parasite. It is a misshapen nervous system protein that is infectious because inside a mammal it can make the mammal’s own proteins become misshapen and holes start to form in the brain. The diseases are always fatal and terrible for those affected. They were very hard to understand at first because some people thought such diseases were genetic (so it was the person’s genes that made their proteins go wrong – and some prion diseases are genetic) but a man named Carlton Gadjusek made a Nobel prize winning discovery that they diseases were definitely infectious (even if the first case was genetic) and a man named Stanley Prusiner made another Nobel prize winning discovery that the infectious agent was the misshapen protein. The prion diseases I worked on were BSE (mad cow disease) in cattle and the human disease it caused called vCJD.

    • Photo: Rosie Fok

      Rosie Fok answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      I’m a clinician, rather than a researcher, but I have helped to contribute to research. We had a study looking at whether combining two antibiotics were better than one in patients with a particular infection. It was difficult to do, because the one we wanted to compare (to placebo, or the dummy medicine) has a side effect of turning your wee orange, but the doctors and nurses weren’t meant to know whether the patient had this real medicine or the dummy medicine – they were sworn to secrecy!

    • Photo: Liz Buckingham-Jeffery

      Liz Buckingham-Jeffery answered on 13 Jun 2017:

      I’m still quite near the start of my career, so I haven’t researched many different diseases yet. But one interesting disease I have looked at is Visceral Leishmaniasis (which we call VL for short!) in Brazil. I thought it was interesting because it is spread by sandflies. A sandfly can bite a human or a dog and the human and dog can get ill. But if a sandfly bites a chicken, it won’t get ill. I thought that was an interesting fact!

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