How Do Plants Become Medicines? Jenny Hayes
Event details
Many of the medicines we use today have their origins in plants such as willow, poppy, foxglove and sweet wormwood. Jenny Hayes of the University of York discusses the discovery of these medicines, as well as self-medication in animals including chimpanzees and cats.
Join Jenny to find out how herbal extracts are developed into pure drugs, and how the scientific search for new drugs continues to take inspiration from nature.
About the speaker
Jenny Hayes is a Research Technician at the University of York, UK. She did her undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. Her Masters project was completed in Professor Mark Howarth’s lab, on developing a new split protein tag. Before coming to York, she worked at a number of technician and scientist contracts around Oxford. This included learning cell culture at Oxford Biomedica, making Zika viral DNA at a startup, and extracting DNA from saliva samples in an orthopaedic clinic. In 2016 she started her PhD in Biological Chemistry at the University of York. She is currently working for Dr Benjamin Lichman, Department of Biology, on how catnip enzymes could be used to make insect repellent.
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