Question: You said you cut and paste DNA in a attempt to find the cause of blood cancer, would you ever recommend helping children learn this?

Sophie Robinson answered on 9 Mar 2015:

I would like to bring some of what I do to classrooms to show children what I do on a day to day basis. For instance it would be very easy to extract some DNA from say a strawberry. All you have to do is follow what’s called a protocol, essentially a recipe or set of instructions, by adding different chemicals in a certain order and at the end you’d see the DNA as a sticky, glupey white substance in a tube. Obviously there are certain things I can’t bring into classrooms. For example, the cells I use must be kept in certain conditions and wouldn’t survive outside an incubator. Also there are certain dangerous chemicals which wouldn’t be suitable for use in a classroom.

Also there are quite strict rules on editing i.e. ‘cutting and pasting DNA’. In the lab we take people’s blood and use their white blood cells to do experiments with. However, we have to follow quite strict guidelines when we do this and no-one is allowed to work with their own DNA. So you’d definitely need some proper training before being allowed to do this and probably have to be aged over 18.

Saying that, there are plenty of fun experiments we could do in the classroom without breaking the rules!