• Question: What is it that interests you the most about your work Do you intend to work on this topic until you find the answer?

    Asked by jamjarjarvis to Barbara, Matt, Ravinder, Sophie, Tristan on 13 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Sophie Robinson

      Sophie Robinson answered on 13 Mar 2015:


      The thing that interests me most is how one day I can be growing some stem cells from a mouse embryo and two days later, just by growing them with certain chemicals, they can completely transform into tiny beating heart cells.

      It would be great to be able to work on blood cancer until I can find out what is causing it to develop in certain patients. However there are a couple of barriers that will probably prevent me from doing this. Firstly, I only have money to carry out this research for another year and a half. After that the money runs out and I will probably have to move to a new lab and apply for more funding. Secondly, however many answers you find out, science will always produce many more questions to find the answer to!

      For example, if I discover the function of the gene that I’m working on then that will lead to more questions like how is it carrying out this function? What can we do to stop it to help treat patients? So it is almost never-ending and science is always moving forward!

    • Photo: Matthew Moore

      Matthew Moore answered on 19 Mar 2015:


      Sorry, missed this question!

      What most interests me is molecular evolution, how changes in the DNA (in particular in bacteria) can affect its phenotype (the way it behaves or other characteristics).

      Better understanding of the evolution of bacteria, which can be way more complicated than animal evolution would be brilliant and be really important in tackling infectious diseases!

      This isn’t a single clear question to be answered though, rather something that is a complex phenomena to be better but probably never fully understood.

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