• Question: what is the hardest question you have been asked?

    Asked by _.bxo to Ashley, Bernard, Carsten, MariaMagdalena, Monique on 17 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Monique Henson

      Monique Henson answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Potentially this one! Haha. In all seriousness though, I’ve been thinking about this one all day and I can’t really decide. Scientists think about difficult questions all the time, but we usually break them up into easier chunks before we try to answer them. That way they don’t seem quite so daunting.

    • Photo: Bernard Ennis

      Bernard Ennis answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      The hardest question I have been asked is whether my invention could be used for military purposes. The reason it’s a hard question is because there are no right and wrong answers. The easy answer is of course that it is entirely possible that any invention could be used for purposes which I believe are morally or ethically corrupt (military, criminal, terrorism or nuclear industry). The difficult part is deciding how how far I should take the potential actions of others into consideration when making an invention into a product (in my case a new material). I believe that it is the responsibility of scientists to consider the ethical aspects of their work. For me this means that I do not work on materials that are specifically intended for use by the military or in the nuclear industry, except where this will explicitly lead to a reduction in nuclear waste.

    • Photo: Ashley Hughes

      Ashley Hughes answered on 18 Nov 2015:

      I have been asked a fair few times about animal testing. This can be quite a charged question sometimes but I think I answered ok, what was harder though was covering such a sensitive issue within the Live Chat area, it is much more fast paced – too fast I feel to cover such an ethical question!

Comments