• Question: In detail, how would you spend the money given to you by the grant?

    Asked by timmy to Alex, Laura, Lesley, Richard, vediacan on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Alex Agyemang

      Alex Agyemang answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Hi Timmy,

      I will spend the money by sponsoring a student or group of students to attend a scientific conference or workshop to provide better awareness of the importance of pharmacology and the significant contributions (such as the discovery of penicillin) pharmacologists and scientists in general make to society.

      I hope this is helpful.

      Best wishes,
      Alex

    • Photo: Richard Prince

      Richard Prince answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Hi Timmy,
      I want to set up an open day activity teaching people about the active ingredient of chili peppers, capsaicin. In the activity, people will extract capsaicin from dried chilis into alcohol, and then dilute it into water. They will taste the dilutions and find out the most dilute solution that they can still taste the chili “heat” in. That allows you to give the chili a hotness rating on a scale called the Scoville scale. e.g. if the lowest dilution that you can detect heat in is 1000x diluted, then the pepper has a Scoville rating of 1000. The stronger the chili, the higher the rating. I’ll use the money to buy dried chilis, alcohol, sterile water, cups, pipettes etc and for travelling expenses to take the activity to local schools.
      The reason I think this will be successful is that people always remember experiments they do on themselves. They’ll learn about how to make dilutions, about capsaicin and about the protein it binds to in the body: the VR1 receptor. VR1 is important because it is how the body detects painful heat. Capsaicin activates it and that’s why chilis taste hot!
      Best wishes
      Richard

    • Photo: Laura Newton

      Laura Newton answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Hey Timmy,

      I would like to use it to set up a program at my university where schoolchildren (probably aimed at GCSE-A-levels) can come and visit the university, get tours around the different science departments, including the laboratories from current students, who can explain what they are working on. Then I would like to get them all together and stage and an interactive session kind of like what goes on here, where children can ask scientists any questions they want.

      I think it’s really important that people are allowed and encouraged to ask as many questions as they want so that they can make informed decisions about what they do in their lives, for example whether they decide to get vaccinations or recycle their waste. Hopefully as well as giving school students a chance to see what it’s really like at a university, giving them the opportunity to ask more questions on that day will encourage them to keep asking questions about everything during the rest of their lives.

      Hopefully, once I’ve used the money to set the program up the university will keep supporting it and turn it into a permanent scheme.

      Thanks for your question!
      Laura

    • Photo: Vedia Can

      Vedia Can answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Hi Timmy,

      I’m pretty certain I have answered this question before, so, I will keep it very brief. The concept is ‘bite sized adverse reactions’. Its pretty similar to Laura’s explanation. However, I will get you guys to carry out laboratory practicals where you test different ingredients on the Daphnia and count it’s pulse.

      Best Wishes,

      Vedia

    • Photo: Lesley Pearson

      Lesley Pearson answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Hi Timmy,

      I have been doing a lot of schools outreach work, going into local schools and talking to them about the work that we do. With the money from the grant, I would set up a package of small experiments that I could take out to the schools so that the pupils could get a hands on look at the sorts of work that we do. There are a lot of colour change reactions that we do to measure if an enzyme is working or if a cell is alive, it would be great to be able to scale these up so that pupils could see them properly!

      Thanks

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