• Question: If you had a million pounds how would you spend it.

    Asked by Lord of the strings to Sandra, Hummy, Lewis, James on 8 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by I <3 Dakshat.
    • Photo: Sandra Greive

      Sandra Greive answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      A million pounds is a huge amount of money in real life, but isn’t very much in research terms because research is a very expensive process. I would use it to understand how positive strand RNA viruses (like Zika virus) make new copies of themselves. This would probably be 5 year project to pay for me and maybe one other scientist to figure out how to purify the molecular machines that make new viruses out of infected cells. Virus culture is expensive as it needs lots of special equipment to grow the cells and viruses and to stop the virus infecting anything else. Then we would pay for access to a very powerful electron microscope to take lots of pictures of the purified virus factories. All of these images could then be processed using super computers (which costs more money) to turn these pictures into a 3D image of the virus making machines. Next stop – up close and personal virtual reality tour of a virus factory, followed by designing drugs to stop it from working.

    • Photo: Lewis Wright

      Lewis Wright answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      Id take the people in my office out for an all-expenses paid celebration meal and afterwards drinks.

      Id buy a little house somewhere to keep my stuff in, and with the rest of it self-fund my way through as many PhDs as I could afford, in as many different research areas as possible!

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