Question: What would you say has been your biggest achievement in Science?

Michael Taggart answered on 16 Jun 2011:

Jings, that’s a hard one – not because there have been lots of achevements but because it sounds a bit rubbish to talk about your own achievements.
Well, just recently we published a big long paper that tried to combine in a computer model all the information known aout how uterine muscle cell – the cells that control the ability of a pregnant womens uterus to contract and relax during labour – is controlled by the electric potential passing across it. We think will be a starting point for our lab and others to add to the model with future experiements and so, continually increase the chances of being able to predict and test the actions of any new drugs that might influence uterine contractions during labour. This is important as premature labour is a big problem, especially for the health of the babies, yet we can’t do much to stop it. Drug companies view this kind of work as very risky (translation: the insurance costs to give a pregnant woman a new drug are expensive) and so maybe the development of these types of computer models will help them rethink. It also took 5 years start to finish. So for those reasons I guess tit’s been a satisfying achievement.