Science in Society

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Catch a bad guy

WHEN the phone rings, Amoret Whitaker drops everything and heads off to a crime scene at a moment's notice. As a forensic entomologist, Whitaker researches the way bugs decompose a body and uses that information to solve crimes. Between cases she works at both London's Natural History Museum and the Body Farm in Tennessee, where she conducts research on cadavers. The job isn't for the faint-hearted, she warns. "You're given information before you get to a crime scene, but it's never the same as seeing it for yourself." And if police are looking for a new lead, a cadaver is taken out of the freezer, which, she says, occasionally entails "collecting frozen maggots off the body".

Keeping a level head is crucial. "However many bodies you've seen, you still have to look at each case with fresh eyes to make sure you collect all the evidence," she says. You also have to be patient as there might be a lot of standing around. "If they are exhuming a body, for instance, you might be there all day waiting for them to get it out of the ground before you can get near it."

When Whitaker isn't looking at maggots or decomposing bodies, she uses the morbidly glamorous nature of her job to encourage young people through the government's "Science: So what? So everything" campaign. "I show them that I'm a scientist doing something exciting that is really useful to society," she says.

Cure a disease

FINDING a cure for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's is easier said than done. It can take decades and masses of patience. Ask anyone working in drug discovery, though, and they all say the same thing: the potential impact of success makes it worth the wait. "There's always the possibility that tomorrow you will make something that has a huge impact on everyone's lives," says James Collins, who is working on cancer drugs for his PhD, which is sponsored by Cancer Research UK.

Drug discovery can vary from lab work to direct patient contact in clinical trials, and draws in graduates from a range of backgrounds. Astrophysics graduate Darren Groombridge is a case in point. "I aspired to become an academic researcher, but then I realised I wanted to use my knowledge to benefit society more directly," he says. So he did just that, going on to work as a radiation facilities engineer at the Gray Cancer Institute at the University of Oxford.

The key to success is to address important and ambitious scientific questions - and to be persistent, says Alzheimer's researcher Anthony Fitzpatrick at the University of Cambridge: "The most challenging aspect of my research is that only a fraction of my ideas work. But when they do it's the best feeling in the world."

Prevent a disaster

Back in 1969, a team of scientists discovered that a deadly micro-organism had hitched a ride to Earth on the back of a military satellite, killing every human who had the misfortune to come near it. Luckily, that's just the plot of sci-fi thriller The Andromeda Strain. But don't rule out the possibility just yet.

Mike Guest certainly hasn't. He works for aerospace engineers SEA. His job? Preventing any potentially dangerous Martian pathogens from wiping out us earthlings. To do that, Guest is working with the Health Protection Agency and London's Natural History Museum to design a bio-containment facility for a capsule-return mission to Mars. That means making sure any potentially deadly strains on samples are contained, while protecting the samples to preserve them for analysis.

We have to ask though - what are the chances of this actually being used? "It's not massively likely that there is life on Mars, so the chances of picking up something dangerous is very low," says Guest, "but who knows what we might find out between now and sending a Mars return mission in, say, 20 years' time."

Laura Baker also protects us humans, by keeping a watchful eye on some of the most dangerous storms that hit Europe. The aptly named "sting jets" result in very strong surface winds and can cause a lot of damage, says Baker, who is studying the phenomenon for her PhD at the University of Reading. "Only a few cases have been identified so far, so the research is to identify more of them and determine what the important features of these storms are. Ultimately, the aim would be to know enough about them to predict them," Baker says.

You needn't risk your own life chasing tornadoes in a 4x4, either. "My research is all computer modelling, which means things are less likely to go wrong," Baker says. "Utimately, it's something really interesting I can do with maths that has real-life implications."

Whether it's predicting dangerous storms or preventing an alien invasion, a science degree is clearly a useful weapon against impending doom. Luke Alphey is using his to potentially save millions of people - by designing a cunning method of pest control. His company, Oxitec, uses genetically modified insects that mate with pests, but pass on a gene that kills their offspring. "I started in academia with research on Drosophila and realised that this type of genetics could be applied to make a major difference in controlling pests all over the world," Alphey says.

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