• Question: What are you currently doing to improve the world for our future generations?

    Asked by anon-98237 to Aaron, Abbey, Keith, Natalie, Pete on 10 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by Gracie, SOPHIA M, barakat, Duck, Molly232, Unicorn, Blondie4321.
    • Photo: Natalie Garrett

      Natalie Garrett answered on 10 Nov 2015:


      My current project is all about making new types of medicines so that we can help treat brain diseases more effectively. The reason this is necessary is that 98% of all drugs can’t actually get into your brain! Drugs companies spend billions of dollars developing new drugs that would be amazing at treating diseases but they just can’t get them to go where they’re needed. This is because the blood vessels in your brain have a special coating to help protect the brain from viruses and bacteria, it’s called: the blood brain barrier (BBB for short).

      I work with pharmacists at the School of Pharmacy in London, and they make nanoparticles that can actually carry drugs past the BBB. My job in the project is to use advanced laser techniques to take pictures of brains and see where inside them the nanoparticles are going. One day soon, hopefully these nanoparticles will be available to people for treating things like Alzheimer’s, brain cancer, among other diseases. I lost an aunt to brain cancer, so this really is a very important topic to me, and I hope one day that my work will have helped a lot of people.

    • Photo: Aaron Boardley

      Aaron Boardley answered on 10 Nov 2015:


      A lot of the problems facing the world will be solved by scientists and engineers – who will come up with new tools to help us fix bodies, or solve climate change.

      Unfortunately, at the moment we have a lot of older engineers retiring and not as many young people becoming new engineers – so each year we are missing about 75,000 new engineers we really need. One of the things I’m trying to do is help make people aware of this and encourage them to consider careers in science and engineering – so they can tackle the problems we’ll be facing. The more engineers we have, the more likely we’ll be able to tackle the problems – but we need lots of young, creative minds coming up with new solutions!

      If I win, I’ll spend the prize money to help people try out an engineering course at uni, for example, to see if it’s something they might like to try.

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