Graeme -  I guess this depends on what we’re going to make the molecule for.  We do a lot of our work on pharmaceutical molecules.  Obviously, those go through quite a lot of very strict clinical testing to make sure they're safe for people. Other molecules could be dangerous in other ways, like exploding, so chemical stability...

Chris -  There is this whole question about nanohazard, isn't there?  Are people worried particularly and what they're doing to make sure that when we generate tiny things like carbon nanotubes and thing they are not going to be the next asbestos.

Graeme -  I guess that's true so you'd need again, if this is going to be something which people are going to be around then they need to be biologically tested to make sure they don't interact in nasty ways with people.

Graeme -   There are some quite sophisticated computational methods based largely on quantum chemistry, which we can use to determine the properties of a molecule.  Now the accuracy of this depends a lot on what property we’re trying to predict.  Some are easy, some are very, very difficult, and people are having to work very hard to get the methods up to a good enough accuracy to try to predict.  So, we know obviously we can predict the shape or the size of a molecule.  We could then from that predict say, the density of a structure, or even the colour is reasonably easy to predict.  Other things, maybe, I don't know, the solubility of the material, relates both to molecular structure and to the crystal structure, and that's notoriously difficult to predict.  So it really depends on the property you're interested in, whether we can predict it or not, but we’re trying to make the methods as widely applicable as we can so that we can predict and design lots of different types of neat and interesting properties.

Graeme -   Well, most of my work is actually on a computer, so that's fairly safe, so unless the computer is going to blow up itself, then we’re okay.  Other scientists?  I guess it depends.  Chemists, I don't think there's a big risk that we’re going to blow up the world.

Helen -   I think us Marine Biologists are fairly safe as well, but it’s always something worth bearing in mind,  I think, destroying the world accidentally through science – no, no, no.