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Asked by 535cesf27 to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 12 Jun 2016.
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Rob Brass answered on 12 Jun 2016:
Well I feel like my job is important in 2 ways. I do day to day work like planning radiotherapy treatments, making measurements on the machines, etc. This helps the department run smoothly and safely and means patients can receive a good standard of care. Also, I work on lots of different projects and clinical trials which look into alternative ways of treating with radiotherapy. These projects are important to keep improving our service and improve our cure rates while reducing side effects.
Personally, yes I’m in it to help people. I did my physics degree at Cardiff which is heavily involved in astronomy, I hadnt really heard of medical physics until my 1st year at uni. Straight away it stood out as a way to use my physics skillls to directly help people.
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Sam Briggs answered on 12 Jun 2016:
Hi 535cesf27,
You’ve hit on a really interesting aspect of societal understanding of science here and one that I think warrants a slightly lengthy answer – please bear with me!
It all depends on what you mean by important – I think pretty much every job that everyone in the world does is important to some extent, if someone didn’t do their bit of the work then maybe somewhere down the line someone else loses out or gets hurt. I think the thing with the sciences is, they can be quite speculative, we’re trying to create answers to problems that don’t exist yet – and I think that investing in future problems is a good thing as we can’t predict what is yet to come. So in that sens e – yes I think being a scientist is very important. But saying things like that makes people think that science is only about big breakthroughs or game changing things. Sometimes it’s about completions a picture of our understanding or just finding new things that are cool without knowing how we might use them yet. But as Douglas Adams once said, can’t a garden be beautiful without believing that there are fairies at the bottom of it?
For me, a long way off in the future, my work could be used in a great variety of fields that could help humans, machines, or industry and its that potential that is interesting, but it doesn’t stop a thing being beautiful just for being itself, or demean its importance if there aren’t immediate applications. A lot of very intersting and important science, and most of the breakthroughs (I’m thinking Ada Lovelacer and her work in computing that gives us Bluetooth today), that just aren’t valued or thought of as useful at the time. So work on what you as an individual finds important or intersting, not what someone tells you is!
Hope that helps?
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Matt Dunn answered on 13 Jun 2016:
Hi 535cesf27,
I think my job is important because brain disease is a terrible thing, imagine slowly losing all your memories from your lifetime! I have always thought that it is a very unfair thing to suffer with, and any work I can do to contribute to more information, and eventually a cure, is very important. With my model we can get more information on Parkinson’s and Huntington’s than ever before, and help many people.
That is also why I’m a scientist, to be able to give back and help with the issues that the world faces. I will be old one day, and at risk of brain disease, and it will help me to know that the field is a little bit closer to a cure because of my work as a scientist.
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