• Question: Within your topic, what is your favorite point, and the best thing you have done?

    Asked by u11ordmcdermottf to Debbie, Glyn, Jon, Kat, Nicola on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by ashwee274933, beckyjenko.
    • Photo: Debbie Crockard

      Debbie Crockard answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Thats a really hard question, what I do now is so different to the work I’ve done before, but it all has its higlights and favourite points.

      I think my favourite moment still has to be Japan – it was my first ever research trip after graduating and the first time I’d ever been to Japan, the country was amazing and the people were so welcoming and lovely. But the best thing was discovering the worlds deepest living fish. What made it so special was that it was so unexpected and the trip was riddled with things going wrong.

      We sent 2 remote landers down to the bottom of the sea – about 7700m down where we were, one was equipt with a stills camera the other with a video camera. After about 48hrs on the sea floor we sent the signal to retrieve them but for about 3 hours we didn’t think they were coming back to the surface because they were not responding to the controls.

      Then when the first did appear the battery on the camera had exploded and the camera was ruined – no still pictures. We were so dissapointed.

      Then the video camera came up – but it wasn’t alone – the two traps we had attached to the camera to catch amphipods (like big sand hoppers you find on the shore) had infact caught not only amphipods but had caught a fish as well! We went from being horribly dissapointed to the most excited and happy I’ve ever been in science!

    • Photo: Jonathan Stone

      Jonathan Stone answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Being able to make a difference to people who are effected by volcanoes, and seeing them be happier/feel safer as a result.

    • Photo: Glyn Barrett

      Glyn Barrett answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      There are loads of cool things. One has to be when I drop bacteria into frozen nitrogen at -196C! They turn into solid ice almost instantaneously.
      Also I use an electron microscope which allows me to see things really really really! small things in 3D.

    • Photo: Nicola Fletcher

      Nicola Fletcher answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Feeling like I might make a difference to people who are very sick….that would be brilliant. I think the best thing I have done so far is discover that hepatitis C virus infects the brain….people thought it only infected the liver.

    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Within my topic, my favourite thing is looking at how different cells work together. We often think of cells on their own e.g a brain cell, a skin cell, but actually, in your body, all of your cells are constantly talking to each other. A brain cell will talk to a blood vessel cell, which will then talk to a blood cell. They’ll tell each other “ok, you need to grow now” or “you need to die now” or even “I’M GOING TO EAT YOU”. I think its fascinating to look at how these cells talk to each other and how this affects how the body works.
      The best thing I have done was to find out what a gene that causes leukemia (cancer of the blood) did in normal blood cells. We knew lots about what it did in leukaemia, but very little about whether it did in normal blood cells. Lots of people around the world were really interested in it and it was a bit of a race to see who could find out first, which was exiting (and a bit scary!)!

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