Question: How do you think science will change the world in the future?

Elliot Jokl answered on 24 Jun 2016:

Thanks for the question!

I think the easiest way to think about this question is to think about the challenges we have. We need good, clean sources of power. We need to be able to feed a very large global population. There are lots and lots of diseases that we might be able to develop cures and treatments for.

For power, I think that the development of nuclear fusion reactors will be a game-changer – so this is where energy is released by squishing two nuclei together (that is the highly technical language). This doesn’t produce the same radioactive waste as nuclear fission reactors,, and also doesn’t release CO2 like burning fossil fuels, which is a big advantage to stop our impact on the environment. If we get better at making batteries, I think we will also get a lot more electric vehicles, which could also be better for the environment. Moving away from using oil might also have political consequences, because a lot of oil is controlled by a small number of people, so maybe that would be a positive change politically too.

Food is pretty challenging – it takes a lot of land to produce enough food and we also use a lot of fertilisers. One problem is, fertilisers are going to become more and more expensive because the minerals we use to make them are going to get harder and harder to get hold of. I don’t really know how this problem can be fixed, but we might be able to develop genetically modified plants that are a lot more efficient at growing to increase the amount of food we produce.

I like thinking about the future of diseases, as this is more my area. I think the one thing in medicine that is really going to take off is the idea of personalised medicine. So one of the big problems when it comes to treating diseases is that two people who have the same disease might be better off with different treatments. This is particularly true in cancers – even if two people have cancer in the same part of their body, the tumours might actually be quite different and be best treated with different drugs. Researchers and doctors are working on lots of ways to test a patient to find out what treatment is best for them. As technology gets better, people could potentially get very quick access to the best possible drugs for their particular form of a disease.