Question: what scientific breakthroughs have you made in your career?

Stephen Curry answered on 13 Jun 2010:

Funny enough, most of the work of most scientists doesn’t produce breakthroughs. Not on the scale of Newton’s theory of gravity or the discovery of the structure of DNA.

Mostly we are doing experiments to test existing ideas and check that they are good ones. The breakthroughs usually happen when you start to get unexpected results that your theory doesn’t explain. Then, if you are lucky enough and clever enough, you might come up with a blockbuster theory that wins a Nobel prize.

I don’t fancy my chances of doing that. But I have had my moments. This was one of the special ones (which I’ve already mentioned in an answer to a similar question):

One of my most exciting experiments was done about 15 years ago when I was working in a lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston in the USA. I was working on poliovirus* and trying to understand how the virus particle gets into the cell. The virus is basically a 3D jigsaw of protein molecules that make a shell surrounding an RNA molecule (that carries the virus genes). It is the job of the virus to deliver the genes to the inside of the cell.

First the virus sticks to a molecule on the outside of the cell. After that, my work showed that the jigsaw of proteins changes shape. It becomes a bit looser. This allows it to stick to the cell membrane and punch a hole in it that lets the RNA molecule to leak into the cell. Once that happens, the cell is infected.

Until my work nobody really believe that the change in shape of the protein shell of the virus was important. But now it is in all the textbook on virology, so I am quite proud!

*Poliovirus is a germ that usually causes ‘flu like symptoms but in some people can result in paralysis. Fortunately it has almost disappeared from the world now because there is a very effective vaccine – usually given to children on a sugar cube. You will almost certainly have been given it as a small child.