Question: do i benefit from your job (working with gold)? if yes how? if no why do you do it?

Andrew Fensham-Smith answered on 15 Jun 2015:

When people look at what sort of research to fund, it’s extremely difficult to decide. I honestly don’t know if my research will affect many people outside academia, because I don’t know how much I’m going to discover yet. It’s possible that tomorrow all my ideas start working, I find lots of awesome catalysts for reactions we currently can’t do, and people use it to make drugs and materials. It’s also possible that anything I find out remains in my thesis and the literature without anyone ever reading it except my supervisor (this is probably more likely).

So to answer your questions of why I do my job, I’d have to say two main reasons; I enjoy it and I learn some valuable skills in doing it. Doing a PhD is about learning skills you’ll use in your job and doing some research as you do it. Not everyone who does research is looking for a cure for cancer, or how to live forever – and that’s a good thing! Research like mine might go into technology which either eventually helps make new drugs cheaper, or helps somebody else discover something which is the next big thing. Science advances in fits and starts so very few people work on something they know will affect everybody in the world.