• Question: What do you believe is an 'underrated' part of science? ( A part of science that you find interesting, but is overlooked often by other scientists/people )

    Asked by anon-249968 on 19 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Nuru Noor

      Nuru Noor answered on 19 Mar 2020:

      Clinical trials – we have a fair amount of work but definitely need more information about the best medicines for different medical conditions💊

    • Photo: M S

      M S answered on 19 Mar 2020:

      I think its neglected tropical diseases. Diseases that normally affect very poor people. I think they need to be looked at more highly.

    • Photo: Robyn Kiy

      Robyn Kiy answered on 19 Mar 2020:

      Using DNA to ‘personalise’ treatments is a big thing in science, known as ‘personalised medicine’. I think it’s important to also consider the DNA of mitochondria when thinking about certain treatments!

    • Photo: Andrea Kusec

      Andrea Kusec answered on 19 Mar 2020:

      I think the field of psychometrics (understanding how we measure information in order to use maths to make predictions about similar situations and events) is underrated. Psychometrics is all about minimising any error in what we measure – for example, if I use a test to measure someone’s memory, how can I be sure that test is actually telling me anything about memory, and not something else? We use these tests to make big assumptions and conclusions about people and especially when such tests can potentially affect a person in a big way (such as A-Level outcomes!) it’s really important that we ensure that the tests we use actually measure something useful as well as what we intend to measure.

    • Photo: Sarah Brown

      Sarah Brown answered on 20 Mar 2020:

      Maths! Maths can be used in so many ways to learn about diseases, animals, bodily functions, physical processes etc. It is cheap, fast and risk free (doesn’t require animal testing!). Clearly mathematical modelling needs to be combined with some way of collecting data however once you have a validated model, it can be used to learn about mechanisms or even to predict future events.

      Great question by the way! 🙂

    • Photo: Sophie Arthur

      Sophie Arthur answered on 20 Mar 2020:

      Wow – what a great question. Hmmmm…
      For me, I would say metabolism – so all the chemical reactions that go on within your body that helps us get energy and produce all the key molecules our cells need. I think it is something that is coming more and more to everyone’s attention, but it really has so much influence on everything in our cells and needs to be considered in all areas of research

    • Photo: Kate Mitchell

      Kate Mitchell answered on 23 Mar 2020:

      In infectious disease research, we often ignore how factors like how poor someone is affect their risk of getting a disease – I think this should get more attention.

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