• Question: How are you protecting the envirmoent with chemicals and do you use animals in any of your studies?

    Asked by anon-294524 on 20 May 2021.
    • Photo: Jennifer Graham

      Jennifer Graham answered on 20 May 2021:

      This is a great question and one I have thought about in the past. I use some rare chemicals, and you always have to question where these come from and the conditions they were collected in. My reactions also need super high temperatures (like 1500 C!) so that obviously has a negative impact on the environment with the energy we use to make our materials. Also, with the pandemic I have become very aware of how many gloves I use, I don’t think I could use any less than I currently do but it is very wasteful and we don’t recycle them.

    • Photo: Axel Moore

      Axel Moore answered on 20 May 2021:

      It is unfortunate but science does tend to produce a lot of waste. This is because scientist need to both protect themselves from dangerous materials (biological matter, toxic chemicals) and protect their experiments from themselves and environment (bacterial, dust, oils on your fingers). In our lab we aim to make a small amount of waste by keeping everything clean and tidy (prevents contamination of our samples) and cataloging all materials (we don’t want to have 2 of the same chemical).

      I do use animals in my studies; however, it takes many years of product development before we are even going to consider this. We use animals when there is no other way to evaluate the safety of a material or device before putting it in a human. There are several steps and constant oversight for anyone working with animals, particularly large animals (e.g., pigs) like in my work.

      There is a lot of ongoing work to develop alternative test bed that avoid the use of animals; however, some of the most important things about an animal model are its immune system, blood circulation, locomotion, and reaction to pain. Replicating all of these features in a dish is at least several years away, and many more before we can use it to completely replace animals.

    • Photo: John Grasmeder

      John Grasmeder answered on 20 May 2021:

      The company I work for makes advanced materials which replace metals in aeroplanes and cars. This reduces their weight and so they use less fuel and emit less CO2. We estimate our materials have save over 5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. We also power our manufacturing plants and factories using renewable energy wherever we can. We want to become carbon neutral by 2030. We don’t use animals in any of our labs.

    • Photo: Philip Drake

      Philip Drake answered on 20 May 2021:

      Chemicals is a misunderstood and misused term. Chemicals are all around us all the time. CFSs were used to make fridges but they were found to be damaging the ozone layer. It was chemistry that lead to their use and chemistry that lead to the problem being seen and chemistry that lead to a solution. The ozone layer is now healing and different chemicals are used in fridges and aerosols. The current problem is with carbondioxide. Chemists are looking into how we can use carbondioxide to build material, kind of copying nature, plants take carbondioxide and build sugars and wood…..we can do the same. Chemicals are not bad…..they are just badly used by people! The best thing we can do for the environment is Reduce, Reuse and Recycle as much as possible!

      I do use animals in some of my work but only when it is really needed. When we invent new cancer treatments we first try them in test tubes by growing cancer cells and seeing what happens. We then test them on other cells and see if they are OK, but eventually we need to try them in living things to see if they work as expected and that they are safe. Once these are all complete we need to test them on people. The aim is always to do no harm….but we need to experiment to check that we do no harm!

    • Photo: Simon Williams

      Simon Williams answered on 20 May 2021:

      Great question and some excellent answers posted already. I work on chemicals for use in food production that will directly go into the environment, this is ethically an very complex issue. We clearly need to produce food for an increasing population but without destroying the climate or the environment in the process. If we can get farming right, it can have an enormously positive impact on climate change too. Well designed, carefully tested new chemicals can reduce our use of old fashioned pesticides in agriculture and help restore biodiversity to farms.
      Philip makes the excellent point that chemicals is a misunderstood term – not all chemicals are equal. A naturally derived molecule that boosts a plants immune system is not the same as a highly toxic pesticide. It can achieve the same effect in the target crop but with a much lower impact on the environment.

      Unfortunately animal testing is the best way we have of assessing how safe chemicals (of any type) are to humans. As we understand biology better we can do less animal testing but the body is so complex that we are a long way from understanding it well enough to replace animal testing completely.

    • Photo: Emma Yhnell

      Emma Yhnell answered on 23 May 2021:

      Good question.
      All of the chemicals we use in science have to be disposed of properly, but you are correct sometimes it does create a lot of waste.
      Animals are used in science research and we have to follow really strict rules because the Government controls it.

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