• Question: How Do You Hope To Develop Your Work In The Future?

    Asked by iheartalltimelow100 to Ollie, Amy, Alex, Andy, Georgia on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by groverunderwood321, 07moocha, puti2shoes1405.
    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Hi,

      Good question! I hope to use my work to be able to develop a cure for Parkinson’s disease. We can only do this though when we understand what makes cells die. The only treatments at the moment for Parkinson’s disease only help with the symptoms and they don’t even work that well. šŸ™ It is important that we work hard to cure these diseases. šŸ™‚

    • Photo: Ollie Russell

      Ollie Russell answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Good question!
      This is something that I always ask myself. Alot depends on if the drugs im looking at work in cells. If they do then I think i’ll see if they work in tissues such as blood. From here I think we will have to give them to animals to see if they work in them. This isnt a very fun thing to do but unfortunately its the only way to test the drugs before they go into humans.

      If they dont work then i’ll have to think of something else to do šŸ™‚

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hello guys. The project I’ve been working on most recently has been looking at the relationship between the number of genes people carry and their intelligence levels – usually we only carry two copies of each gene, one from each parent, but sometimes the copying mechanism doesn’t go quite right, and we get more or fewer.

      I’ve been looking at how this gene count relates to intelligence levels. We’ve found a couple of genes that we think might be important – what I need to do now is try and see whether these results hold true in other samples.

      But there’s also a lot more information I can get looking at other traits – when our volunteers gave us their DNA and took the intelligence tests, they also went into a lab and got a load of other stuff measured – height, cholesterol level, lung function – all kinds of things. I’m going to be looking at whether gene count affects these things too.

    • Photo: Alex Munro

      Alex Munro answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hello, if I can show that protein consumption does have an effect on physical capability in later life, then we can ā€˜build some recommendationsā€™ around this fact, and advise older people to either eat a little more protein, eat it in a better/more efficient way, or eat more of a certain type…

      Once Iā€™ve answered this questions, and if I have time, I could maybe look at other possible associations/interactions, e.g. protein consumption and cognitive ability or protein consumption and blood pressureā€¦

      Having such a rich set of data, collected over the lifecourse of such a large group of people is an amazing resource!

Comments