• Question: What is the most impressive thing you've learnt or done being a scientist?

    Asked by popcorn32 to Clare, Divya, Ian, Jess, Lewis on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Nevin

      Clare Nevin answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      During the final year of my degree I did a project in a top stem cell biology lab at Manchester University, which is one of the most exciting fields in biomedical science. Stem cells are cells that have the potential to become any kind of cell in the body, from a skin cell or a blood cell to skeletal muscle cell. The early embryo is made up of these kinds of cells which gradually become more specialised during development. I worked on trying to force stem cells to become nerve cells so that they could be injected into patients with debilitating diseases like multiple sclerosis where the body destroys its own neurons. To experience research with such huge implications for public health was what impressed me the most so far in my career!

    • Photo: Lewis Dean

      Lewis Dean answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The main project that I did from 2007 to 2010 (during my research for my PhD) looked at how and why humans (children) can solve more complicated puzzles, but chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys (and other primates) can’t. We already knew that there was a difference, but we wanted to work out why there was a difference. Lots of people had an idea about why there was a difference, but no one had tested those ideas. So that’s what we did.

      Our research showed humans did better at these puzzles because we share more, teach one another and use language. When we had done the research we wrote it up and it was published in a magazine called ‘Science’. Science is read by a lot of people (well, a lot of scientists), so we got lots of questions and comments about the work. It really felt like we had made a difference (in a small way!).

    • Photo: Jess Smith

      Jess Smith answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I’m not sure. The device that we are making is currently undergoing trials, and I’m super proud to have been a part of getting the project to this point!

    • Photo: Ian Hands-Portman

      Ian Hands-Portman answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      That’s a tough one! I’ve worked on so many things – drugs against HIV, ways to make vaccines store better in hot climates but my favourite – because it opens our eyes to the toughness and variety of life was the black smokers –

      They’re undersea geysers and the ones I was asked to help study are under two miles of water off the coast of Antarctica, the water there is cold enough to kill in under a minute if you fall in; but on the sea floor these geysers kick out water full of sulphuric acid and hot enough to melt lead . Even in those conditions life manages to not just survive but thrive, it’s difficult to collect samples even with a robot sub and I was asked to look at the viruses in the water around these smokers – and it was teeming with them, and many didn’t even belong to know families of virus and most fed off bacteria. It might not have lead to a new treatment for anything but it’s still the best bit of work I’ve ever done. I’ve was even allowed to keep a little piece of one of the rocks as a souvenir.

    • Photo: Divya Venkatesh

      Divya Venkatesh answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I’ll go for what I learnt: evolution. I knew about evolution before, but I only started to work on it in my PhD. The sheer sale of it is amazing whether you’re looking at time – billions of years, or complexity – bacteria to humans.

      One of my favourite parts is where ‘prokaryotes’ (like bacteria: small and whose DNA is not in a special compartment in the cells) evolved into eukaryotes (can grow much bigger, have many compartments in the cells including the ‘nucleus’ for DNA). This is the one fundamental change, that we think happened about 1.5 billion (that’s 1,500,000,000) years ago that has led to you, and me, and a huge part of all the diversity we see on earth. We still don’t know how the eukaryote evolved from the prokaryote.

Comments

  • Photo: popcorn32

    popcorn32 commented on :

    Thank you for all answering my question. I never really thought about being a scientist when I was older-and I didn’t think I’d want to! Now though I realise that there are loads of different areas, some that I didn’t even know were counted as science!!!