• Question: Which previous discovery has most helped your research?

    Asked by u12jonesa to Dilwar, Lou, Rachel, Simon, Susan on 11 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by jkerr12.
    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      The biggest discovery that helped me was made by a man called David Barker, who died just a month or so ago. Barker noticed that people who had been born in the 1920s who were smaller than average when they were born were twice as likely to die of heart disease and 8 times more likely to get diabetes. This set me thinking about why this might be the case and all of my research since then has been focused on thinking about how a pregnant woman’s diet influences how her baby grows and the way in which its organs develop. Because of Barker I started on a project that has kept me busy for 20 years and I still haven’t found all of the answers.

    • Photo: Louise Brown

      Louise Brown answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      The discovery that cells can be taken from someones tumour and made to live forever. These are some of the cells I work with, and it means I can grow them in the lab and use them investigate what happens in different circumstances.
      Without this, I would have to rely on getting breast cancer tumours from patients everytime I wanted to try an experiment. I sometimes do this, but the tissue I get is very rare and special, so I wouldn’t want to waste it!

    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      The biggest discovery that has helped my research was the invention of the laser in 1960.

      Lasers produce a special kind of light that does not exist in nature. Ordinary light (like sunlight) is made up of lots of different colours of light. It also travels in all directions : light from a single lightbulb can light up a whole room, not only one corner.

      But laser light contains only one single colour. Laser light waves also travel in only one direction, exactly parallel to one another. This means that laser light beams are very narrow and can be concentrated on one tiny spot.

      I use the light from lasers to 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.

      This technique relies on being able to concentrate the light to a small spot, and I wouldn’t be able to do it without lasers.

Comments