• Question: What would you do if you discovered a new disease?

    Asked by anon-256874 on 17 Jun 2020. This question was also asked by anon-256917.
    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      I would study it in order to understand it and find out what causes it and how. With that knowledge I would then look for treatments and ways to prevent it from happening.

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      If it was an infectious disease, I would definitely start thinking about how we could make a vaccine to protect people from it – prevention is always better than cure! At the moment lots of scientists all over the world are working really hard to develop and test a vaccine for COVID-19, including our laboratory here in Oxford! That might be the only way to control the current pandemic.

    • Photo: Gaby Clarke

      Gaby Clarke answered on 30 Jun 2020:

      The first thing that many scientists do when they discover a new disease is begin to ‘model’ it in animals. This is particularly useful for genetic diseases – that is diseases caused by a mutation in the DNA. For example, they may introduce the disease to flies, worms, fish, mice or rats in the lab to see what happens over time or to specific parts of the body. I don’t want to do this to animals, so I would grow human cells in a dish and add the DNA mutation to them and see what happens 🙂

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