• Question: How long have you been experimenting in science?

    Asked by yazmine to Tom, Steve, Stephen on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Hi Yazmine,

      My first experiment (which I made up myself) was in A-level Biology (when I had people tuning different tones to one another to find out if it was easier to do this for high or low tones (I think). I am 42 now and I would’ve been 17 then so that’s 25 years (*gasp*).

      I did another big experiment as part of my degree (and lots of interesting practicals, which someone else made up to teach us) – it was a pretty cool experiment (I had people indicating where a sound was coming from – out of one of eight speakers surrounding them in a circle, but the sound could be “over here” or “ereh revo”).

      In my PhD I used a computer to model the way we learn new words – fascinating and difficult but not really experimenting.

      So I really only started experimenting (as a job) in about 1996 which is 14 years ago now.

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 19 Jun 2010:

      Hi Yazmine – I guess I have been properly experimenting since the start of my PhD way, way back in 1985 – so this year will be my 25th anniversary!

      In that time I’ve worked in six different labs, studying general anaesthetics, protein crystallography, foot-and-mouth disease virus, poliovirus and latterly (in my own lab) further questions about how viruses make copies of themselves inside infected cells.

      Most of our work is fundamental biology but I hope that some of it may lead to applications in the wider world. At the moment we are quite excited about our search for a drug that will stop foot-and-mouth disease.

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