Question: If you find out anything in your field of science, what would it be?

Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 3 Jul 2020:

Hey Misba.
My field is organic chemistry, and I am trying to find new ways that we can make important chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals (drugs) or plastics. What people in my field hope to do is make the way that we do this more efficient, in a number of ways. This can be through the discovery of new catalysts (catalysts are things that speed chemical reactions up and make doing chemistry much easier!) or find new ways to actually run chemical reactions (using new technologies to change the way catalysts and chemicals interact with each other).
Personally, I like to discover ways to use naturally occurring catalysts called enzymes to do chemistry with. Enzymes (which are proteins) have evolved over millions of years to do the chemistry of the natural world; there are thousands in you and me and they make all the important biochemicals that make our bodies work. In the lab, we can take enzymes from all over nature (plants, animals, bacteria), grow them in the lab and use lab methods to make them work on synthetic chemicals that are important to us, and because they are proteins they work usually under very environmentally friendly conditions (in water, at room temperature) compared with traditional chemical catalysts. This means we can make things that are useful and important and do them in a ‘green’ way, which is obviously important for the future because we need to reduce our carbon emissions.
A Woman called Professor Frances Arnold pioneered the area of chemistry I study, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2018 for her amazing work. If you are interested you should definitely Google her and read about her amazing achievements!