Question: As you seem to be a young scientist what do you have that can outshine you from the others and whats so special about your work?

Ee Lyn Lim answered on 17 Jun 2013:

Hmm…I’m not sure if it has to do with age exactly, but maybe because I haven’t specialised in science for very long yet, I have a fairly open perspective about why people learn science. While I was studying biochemistry at university I also took a class on the history and philosophy of science, and the way that society thinks, as well as the problems faced by the people at the time, really makes a difference to what kind of science is done and how it is done. For example, most of the people we would call ‘biologists’ nowadays were actually clergymen back in the 18th and 19th centuries, and they believed their work was revealing God’s designs – quite different from how we think now!

Even though times have changed a lot since then, there are still differences in how people think about science today, depending on where you are in the world – I’ve worked in the USA, Australia, Hong Kong and Malaysia as well as in the UK, and I’ve realised that the factors that are important in each culture, whether it’s money, or education, or just being comfortable with life, change the way science is taught and learned. That’s why I’ve decided that, since I’m still at the beginning of my career, I would like to have a very broad approach to learning – as well as doing research in science, I would also always keep in mind the way people lead their lives around me, whether it’s the economy, or politics or anything really! I don’t think anything is a waste of time – even watching cartoons – if at the end of it I learn something I didn’t know before.

And what does my work have to do with all of this? Well, I was always really interested in cancer because it’s got a bit of a special status as a disease. People are scared of cancer – to many people ‘cancer’ sounds like a death sentence, and for good reasons. It’s not something you can fix with surgery or a transplant, like heart disease (surgery helps but it doesn’t always work), and it’s not something you can kill with a drug like bacteria or viruses (again, we have medicines for cancer but they don’t work very well!). Cancer can come back again even when you think it’s been cured, and the worst thing is that the treatment might kill you even before the cancer does!

If you think about, we used to be really scared about other diseases too, like tuberculosis and jaundice (people used to think they were vampires and zombies!) but we’re not anymore – and that’s because we know how to deal with them now. My work does that and a little bit more – not only am I trying to find a way to cure cancer, I’m trying to do it without all the nasty and painful side effects that people connect with cancer therapy. I think my work is really important because I’m helping to get rid of that fear, so that one day people who are diagnosed with cancer can just nod and say, ‘Ok, so what should I do to get better again?’