How does medicine work? How are new drugs made? What role does the pharmaceutical industry play? Professors Stefan Knapp and Chas Bountra joined Science Oxford Live in spring 2013 for an evening of Scientists on the sofa, to take your questions.
Have you really got a model for how this ought to work? I wanted to comment about the publication of negative findings. Have you been involved? What is your view on this? How quickly do you think it will happen? You spoke about the research institutes closing down; are they closing down in the UK and relocating, or are they just closing? Is there something to be said for slowing, or stopping, research for diseases of old age, for example Alzheimer's, and instead concentrating on scanning the genome of very young human beings to see what they might get in their future years? In regards to what you were saying about people reacting differently to a drug; that must mean that for a long time doctors have been prescribing things that don't work, and nobody's admitted it? Is that right? Because we are all so very different?
