• Question: What is your favourite experiment

    Asked by heartbeatzh to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 13 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Hi heartbeatzh

      I don’t think I have a specific favourite experiment. For me the best experiments are ones that are well designed and ask an interesting question. There are a couple of experiments which I have done that have given me a lot of satisfaction, one during my undergraduate project and one during PhD. My undergraduate project involved doing a genetic comparison between chimpanzees, bonobos and humans and one of the experiments was looking for a section of DNA in these species. My supervisor had told me it was too difficult to do and a waste of time, but I tried it and it worked and we found that this DNA was in chimps and bonobos but missing in some humans.

      The second experiment was from my PhD and it involved putting a chemical into scaffold that I had made, I then added cells which were designed to stick to this chemical. I didn’t think that it would work, but I tried it and we saw lots of cells on the scaffold with the chemical and none on the scaffold without it. That was the last experiment I needed for my PhD and was such a relief.

      There are lots of other experiments people have done that I think are great, the Large Hadron Collider for example, or the extraction of cells and possibly DNA from a fossilised dinosaur bone and both pretty cool.

      What’s your favourite experiment?

    • Photo: Anzy Miller

      Anzy Miller answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      I’m not sure I have a favourite experiment either. But… sometimes the simple ones are actually pretty cool. I add DNA to cells all the time, to see if its changes the cell. For example you can add DNA into a cell to stop a protein being made (proteins are the things that do everything in the cell so are very important) or you add DNA which will make more of the protein that you would normally have. And the actual process of adding this DNA is actually really cool if you think about it. I usually do a thing called electroporation – which basically means you ELECTROCUTE(!) your cells and this allows your DNA that you have to enter the cells (basically because you’ve messed around with the cell’s wall). And then the cell don’t realise its foreign DNA and so it makes protein from them as it would its normal DNA. Pretty cool huh?

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      I don’t think I have a favourite experiment in my own work, but my favourite experiment elsewhere is the world’s longest experiment. It’s called the Pitch Drop experiment. You should look it up. They are trying to measure how long it takes for this really thick stuff called pitch to drop. They started in 1930, but it kept on dripping when nobody was in the lab, so nobody knew when it dripped! Recently they used webcams to try to catch it, but I think it dripped in a powercut once so that didn’t work either. It drips so slowly so that they have only had 9 drips so far since they started in 1930! How crazy is that?!

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