TEDxSalford

How to Understand the Jargon: Scientists, Drugs and The Ebola Virus

What is science?

The Oxford dictionary provides the following explanation:

The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. (Oxford dictionary)

This definition means:
Science includes an endless variety of subjects that scientists can work on. If you are passionate about a specific subject and want to become a scientist you can choose from many science subcategories. Science offers opportunities for everyone and every taste.

 

Health and Life sciences

As a former PhD researcher, I would like to share with you some insights into health and life sciences:

• Scientists:
  • What do they wear in their laboratories (short version: labs)?
  • What is absolutely wrong with the picture of Jack Andraka?
  • What is a scientific experiment?
  • How do scientists find out if their research results are correct or absolutely wrong?
• Should we be sceptical towards science and vaccines?
• How do pharmaceutical companies develop a new drug?
• Ebola – can scientists, drugs and vaccines help?

Scientists and their ‘secret chamber’ – the scientific laboratory

What do scientists look like, and why is the picture of Jack Andraka wrong?

 

What is a scientific experiment?

 

As simple and straight-forward as a scientific experiment might seem, scientists deal with countless obstacles before they are able to publish their results.

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. (Thomas A. Edison)

How do scientists know what is right or wrong?

Scientists are extremely passionate about their research area. They are very creative and collect a lot of data by doing different types of scientific experiments.

The only principle that does not inhibit process is: anything goes. (Paul Feyerabend)

As soon as scientists publish their research results they are judged by organised scepticism, which means the burden of truth is on the person with the novel claim – your experiments need to be bullet-proof and you are not allowed to cheat with your results.

Within the scientific community it doesn’t matter how popular you are or how much experience you have; every detail of a scientific publication is reviewed by colleagues. They are scientific experts who share wisdom, knowledge and experience because they have also worked on this particular problem.

Following an open discussion, the scientific community comes to one of the following conclusions:

• Confirmed – Yes, the scientific evidence presented in the publication is true.
• Busted – No, the scientific evidence not true/doesn’t make sense.
• Plausible – the evidence might be true, but:
  • we need more evidence.
  • we don’t know how to answer the question yet and will come back to it later.

Scepticism towards science and vaccines – right or wrong?

Science has provided us with many advantages, such as vaccines and modern medicine, thereby increasing the average life span of humans each year.

Science is not a company; it is not even an idea – it’s a process: sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. (Michael Specter)

Despite its advantages, some people avoid vaccinations due to fear of needles and injections (needle phobia).

During a TED conference, Mark Kendall presented a needle-free vaccine patch, which is safer and cheaper compared with a normal vaccination that uses a syringe. He also emphasised that after clean water and medication, vaccination has increased our lifespan the most.

Vaccines are extremely important because they help protecting against diseases: if the vaccine is gone, the disease will come back.

How do vaccines work? Vaccines contain a thing called ‘antigen’, which is a safe form of a germ. With a vaccination, the body is tricked into developing an immune response, which means the body learns how to deal with the safe version of a germ. When the real germ comes along the body recognises the invader very fast because it remembers the defence strategies it developed following vaccination. Therefore, the body can quickly neutralise the disease without developing any disease symptoms.

Seth Berkley presented a more detailed immune response of the body during his TED talk about HIV and flu vaccines. He and many other researchers have spent a lot of energy and many years of their lives developing vaccines.

How difficult can it be to create a new drug to cure diseases?

The development of a drug is a complicated and costly process and it may take years before a new drug reaches a patient.

 

Ebola – time to panic? Is it a scientific weapon used by the government?

Ebola is a virus, which exists among many other viruses in nature. It hasn’t been developed by an evil government to terrorise people.

People catch Ebola after coming into contact with infected body fluids, but don’t get sick immediately. So they pass the disease to others before developing disease symptoms.

In West Africa, about 50% of the patients survive Ebola without any treatment.

Ebola has spread in Africa for several reasons:

• There is a stigma attached to having Ebola and many people are too afraid to get tested.
• Hospitals are unable to treat Ebola due to poor health care conditions.
• Many health workers have abandoned their posts.
• All countries currently encountering Ebola, have experienced extreme poverty, civil wars or corrupt governments.

Currently, scientists are developing two main types of treatments:

• Experimental drugs to help sick people dealing with the disease
  • These drugs haven’t been fully tested yet; however, their potential benefits outweigh their risks.
• Vaccines to help healthy people by training their immune systems on how to fight the Ebola virus.

Often viruses are carried by an animal that isn’t affected by the virus, but the virus can still survive in it. So far, fruit bats seem to be the most likely animal to pass on the Ebola virus. Finding out how the Ebola virus made the leap to people is not very easy because animals, carrying the virus, may have moved to another area, or weather conditions may have affected the rise of the virus.

There is no reason to panic because scientists, the real experts, are doing their best to fight the Ebola virus.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. (Charles Darwin)