• Question: what do you love most about your job? and whats your most favioute experiment you have done and why?

    Asked by demz101 to Susan, Rachel, Dilwar, Lou, Simon on 12 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by ayahferri, mizzlily, ultrasorin.
    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      My favourite thing about my job is that I never know what I am going to find! Experiments are always unpredictable so it is never boring!

      My favourite experiments are whenever I get to use powerful light beams to look at, pick up and move around tiny objects that are too small to see or touch, including cells from our bodies, stinky bacteria, and even single atoms – the smallest pieces of matter in the universe.

      I find it so cool to be able to see the world in so much detail and to be able to control the position of things too, as if I am some sort of microscopic person myself, living in this tiny world! I feel like a borrower! 🙂 Check out the “me and my work” section on my profile for some cool pictures of the microscopic world and you will see why I find it so beautiful!

    • Photo: Rachel Dakin

      Rachel Dakin answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      That’s a tricky question……
      I think the best thing about my job is doing things that no-one else has ever done before. At the moment I’m trying to alter a virus so it’s a mixture of 2. People have done this with other viruses but not the 2 that I’m using – I think that’s pretty cool.
      Favourite experiment there’s been a few but recently it would be infecting a blood vessel with a virus and seeing it work. Firstly I put the gene for green flourescent protein (GFP) in to my virus, when it is made in to a protein it glows green. Next I put this virus into a blood vessel which was sent to the lab from the hospital (there’s a picture of one on my profile). I left the virus inside for 1hour, washed out the vessel and left it to grow for 3 days. After that I used special lights to see if the inside of the blood vessel was glowing green…….. and it was. Seeing that right in front of my eyes was amazing!

    • Photo: Dilwar Hussain

      Dilwar Hussain answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      I’m a PhD student and what I love about it is that’s it’s science being applied to the real world so solve a real problem, for example finding new materials that can withstand high temperatures in a nuclear reactor. In my day to day routine what I love about my job is the fact that it’s a mix of experiments and office work, so if I’ve had enough of one, I could do the other. That keeps me motivated. I especially like it when I come across something new that I didn’t know before. My most favourite experiment I’ve done was when I was dealing with liquid nitrogen (-195 degrees celsius)…and yes that’s really cold, and as a demonstration dropped a tomato into it and it came out crumbling like bits of shredded paper when you touched it. That was really cool!.

    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      Demz

      I love being able to think about the important questions in my research area and designing experiments to find the answers. I also like the people that I work with and the fun we have going to other countries together. We have a lot of laughs and I have played some great practical jokes on people.

      My favorite experiment involved feeding animals a low protein diet in pregnancy and then following the health of their pups, the pups of their pups and the pups of the pups of their pups. It was really exciting as it showed that problems with pregnancy could have an effect over many generations. Your health could be related to what your great grandmother ate!

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