• Question: What do you think the best dicovery in the world is?and why?

    Asked by Laur3n to Sudhin, Sergio, Katie, Frances, Diarmuid, Aoife on 13 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Frances Shiely

      Frances Shiely answered on 13 Nov 2019:

      Antibiotics. Because before this, people died from very simple illnesses such as a sore throat!

    • Photo: Diarmuid Kenny

      Diarmuid Kenny answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      I think Germ theory. Before that, we didn’t know why diseases happened. Then we understood that germs (bacteria) cause a lot of diseases. From there we got things like anitbiotics,sterilization etc

    • Photo: Katie Fala

      Katie Fala answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      I’m going to say DNA (and RNA!). DNA encodes so much information, being able to study and decipher it has really enlightened society imo! Scientists like Darwin and Mendel had already begun to figure out principles of evolution and heredity but they didn’t have a concrete model for how this information was transferred from one generation to the next. We now know that DNA is made up of chains of linked molecules (generally A,T,C,G) that carry the instructions for making proteins. This has revolutionised medicine and biology – for example, some diseases such as cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anaemia can be traced back to specific sequences of DNA in the human body, and work is underway to figure out if the disease can be cured by correcting the DNA sequence. Or the DNA of bacteria can be studied, to reveal what type of bacteria they are, if they have genes to produce useful products or cause disease, where they came from, whether or not they are resistant to antibiotics.

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