• Question: what is your favorite discovery?

    Asked by ktho2222 to Tomasz, Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hi ktho2222,
      My favourite discovery is from the work of a woman called Rita Levi Montalcini. Women weren’t always allowed be scientists and she did experiments in her kitchen to get around this! She isolated something called nerve growth factor and repeated all the cool stuff she did in her kitchen in a lab in the US which allowed her “prove herself” (even though she shouldn’t have had to!) and was then offered a foothold onto the academic scientist ladder!

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      The story around the discovery of the structure of DNA is pretty cool. Also, the fact that they saw how the structure of DNA suggested the way in which DNA might be used as genetic data was quite amazing.

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      I think mine is Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s discovery of evolution by natural selection, closely followed by Gregor Mendel’s discovery of genetic inheritance. Also as a stem cell biologist I should say Martin Evans’ discovery of mouse embryonic stem cells and Shinya Yamanaka’s discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells.

      I think to be honest there are too many!

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