Question: If you're so determined to spot brain cancer, why wouldn't you use this grant to help your discoveries and push your discoveries further than run a family fun day?

Jack Miller answered on 16 Jun 2013:

Hi 09corbridgej,

This most honest answer is probably what I should give first — the rules of I’m a Scientist state that “The £500 is to be spent on a science communication project, to publicise or communicate your research or research area”. This firmly rules out cancer research, I’m afraid!

Don’t worry, however. Cancer research is relatively well funded — it’s always hard to get grants to do work, but you do usually somehow scrape the cash together in the end. My work is supported by a whole host of different organisations, and it’s very expensive — I’m funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation (as we also use this technique to look at heart disease), the UK’s funding bodies (i.e. the taxpayer), and I also recently won a £23k grant to pay for my consumables from a fund set up by the Oxford University Press (which, incidentally, supports the university and the people who work there).

Science communication, on the other hand, is very important. It’s entirely likely that someone out there your age has the ability to solve difficult problems that nobody else can, but doesn’t know it yet. It would be a real shame if they never got to experience how fun what we do can be, or how rewarding it is, through reasons outside of their control. If we get loads of people interested in science as a whole, then some of them might take it forward and end up having successful careers as great scientists — and those that don’t will have a better understanding of what it is that scientists do, and why it’s important. Both of these are a good thing, and it’s always nice to have an excuse to throw buckets of liquid nitrogen around!

In the long run, spending £500 on an activity designed to get more people into science is probably going to be a much better return on investment than spending £500 in the lab — which, incidentally, would get me about a day of playing on the MRI scanner, or maybe some fraction of one of the reagents (chemicals) I use. If, however, just one person decides to spend their lives working on these sorts of hard problems then they’ll be able to make a much better impact on the world than I’ll be able to with a little bit more things to play with in the lab.

Hope this helps,

— Jack