-
Asked by 454actj46 to Samantha, Matt, Deborah, Adele, Adam on 12 Jun 2017.
-
Deborah Aitken answered on 12 Jun 2017:
This is a really interesting question!
From my point of view my research is really worth the money because my robotic training is cheaper than getting a person train people in CPR so its less of a cost to the school/workplace to use. Plus, if you have more people doing good CPR then cardiac arrest victims should need less time in hospital, and have less health complications afterwards which is less of a cost to the NHS – win win.
My funders must think my work is a good idea otherwise they wouldn’t give me money to do it. However, I do have to prove that their money is being spent well.
Harming people? There is only so much funding to go round research, so you have to apply to a competition and only some people get money. So I guess the people who are harmed by my study are the people who’s research didn’t get funding because the money was given to me.
-
-
Adele Wratten answered on 12 Jun 2017:
This is a really interesting question for me too! A lot of my work is about figuring out how to protect towns from the damage caused by flooding. This involves working out how much money it would cost to repair the town after a flood to prove how important it is to protect it. As you can imagine there are so many different people involved, as flooding can affect houses, roads, businesses and all sorts!
-
Matthew Lee answered on 12 Jun 2017:
There is a really really long answer to this question which goes deep into what this thing called ‘impact’ is. In short ‘impact’ is how we measure the effect of what our research does/leads to. But it is measured in a really complicated way so I won’t go into it (mainly because I don’t understand it!)
But. My perspective of my research and the economic stakes of it are: it doesnt really have any economic stakes from my perspective. I do basic science which means that I work on things that dont have direct effects on peoples lives. Instead what we do is we put lots and lots and lots of basic research together to form a larger explanation of what is going on and then this might have an economic effect in the sense that it leads to a drug being developed and the NHS paying for that drug.
But also, my research (and all research) is really quite expensive. We use lots of things that cost incredible amounts of money, for example we use hundreds of antibodies that come in tubes with 0.5ml of antibody in. These tubes can cost anywhere from £300-£600!!From my employers perspective the economic stakes are through ‘impact’. The university wants people to do research that gets really high impact, as it attracts more funding from the government and charities (cancer research uk etc). This funding can then be used to attract more students who then pay tuition fees which the university uses to pay its staff and to expand and do more research.
This is a link that might give you a bit more example/explanation of what ‘impact’ is and how the University of Bristol looks at impact – http://www.bristol.ac.uk/research/impact/health-medicine/
-
Adam Hargreaves answered on 12 Jun 2017:
Hi 454actj46, this is a great question!
From my perspective the people who will benefit from my work will (hopefully!) be the enormous amount of people who are bitten by snakes each year. In particular, I’m trying to make antivenoms which are much cheaper to make, in the hopes that people affected most by snake bites (who also tend to be most affected by poverty), will be able to afford treatment. At the moment one vial of antivenom can be around $100-$300, and for some snakes up to 20 vials or more are needed for successful treatment. This is simply impossible for the people who need it the most to afford.
From my funder’s perspective, they fund research into improving global health, so I guess they feel that my project “fits” with the work they support and that funding it is worthwhile and worth any risks there might be (e.g. none of the experiments could work!).
As for harming someones profits, I’m not actually sure. A friend in our lab suggested maybe pharmaceutical companies, but it’s not like I can make antivenoms for thousands of people all by myself!
Comments