Question: why does Deuan have to keep changing projects?

Deuan Jones answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Well most scientists work on different projects all the time – they’re usually related, like at the moment I’m working on a set of chemicals we know kills parasites but doesn’t hurt humans and we’re trying to figure out how they work – which part of the parasite they attack. If we can find that out then we might find emen more chemicals that do the same job. But I’m also working on other projects where we have a protein in the parasite that we know is important, so we want to find out more about it to try and design drugs against it – so at the moment I’m trying to genetically engineer bacteria to make this protein so I’ve got lots of it to work on.

It’s good to have different projects as sometimes you’ll have a bit of time to wait on one of them – like if you’re waiting for information from a colleague or a week-long experiment. You can just switch and work on the other projects.

Sometimes projects have to be stopped because it stops being useful – like we might find a set of chemicals that kill parasite cells and then find out that all of that type of chemicals also kill human cells and so they’re not going to be used as drugs. We might spend 6 months trying little variations to see if we can find something that only kills the parasites, but if it doesn’t work there comes a point when we have to say ‘ok this isn’t working let’s try something else’.