• Question: what sorts of science do you like doing? x

    Asked by whalefish to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      One of my favourite activities these days is data collection at the synchrotron!

      In our experiments we grow tiny crystals of protein and take them to the Diamond Light Source in Didcot, near Oxford. This is a synchrotron, a giant particle accelerator that whizzes electrons around in a large polygon ring. At every bend the electrons emit intense X-rays which are fired at the crystal. The crystal splits the X-ray into hundreds of different rays that produce a pattern of spots on the detector. And from those spots we can work out what the protein looks like in fantastic detail.

      Each protein is a little nano-machine. Once we can see what it looks like, we can start to figure out how it works.

      Working at the synchrotron is often a bit tense because we have to work for 24 hours without stopping and hope that our crystals are good enough for the experiment.

      if you have access to YouTube, have a look at a short video I made of our last synchrotron trip a couple of weeks ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taFxGiX1qc) or try here: http://www.bio.ph.ic.ac.uk/~scurry/Movie-Diamond-May10.html

    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      My favourite science is physics! I love it because it is the science of everything. Without physics you wouldn’t have any chemistry or biology. I still liked chemistry and biology at school, especially chemistry as you get to do good experiments with chemicals. But physics interests me the most and I went onto study it at university which I really enjoyed.

      My favourite part of physics is particle physics, I love it! Particles and forces make up the whole universe and I love learning about them.

    • Photo: Steve Roser

      Steve Roser answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I like doing science that i don’t know the answer to. That might sound obvious, but in some fields you can know where you’re heading, for example ‘in my PhD I shall work towards the synthesis of this molecule…’ whereas I tend to go…’oooh lets try that and see what happens..’
      This sort of split is a big talking point between scientists and the people who fund them – its obvious that you shouldn’t give people like me shedloads of cash just so we can play about, but at the moment lots of money for research is highly directed, and ‘blue-sky science’ the type I like is really hard to fund. The reason this is a problem is because lots of the things that really change our lives spring unexpectedly out of experiments, and were not planned. You probably know of some like lasers and teflon, and viagra (a heart drug that put a happy smile on the faces of some old gents…)

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Hi Whalefish – there are lots of different ways to answer this, and I’ve already tried some of the others (look at my profile for an idea of the topics I’m interested in, and the methods I use). I’m going to take a different approach here and try to give you an idea of my “scientific personality”.

      I like my work to include:
      i) something that hasn’t been tried before – some people do lots of experiments using similar methods gradually tweaking them; I tend to try and make up something entirely new.
      ii) some theoretical content – for example, I try to work out a simple model that will explain my results or predict the results of a new experiment, not just in general terms, but if possible in terms of numbers that I expect to see in the results.
      iii) I am interested in the big picture
      iv) I like to try and reconcile apparently contradictory ideas
      v) I prefer a simple explanation to a complicated one
      vi) I tend to think that things that seem to belong in different categories might actually lie on a continuum
      vii) I like coming up with new ideas by putting very different concepts together (perhaps applying ideas taken from one subject to a quite different topic)

      You might think all these things sound great, but there’s a lot to be said for the opposite approach in most of these cases, and in fact my “scientific personality” isn’t ideal for my career – most successful scientists are more methodical and focused and less woolly and imaginative. I’ve tried but I can’t change who I am, and the limited successes I’ve had in science have generally been related to the approach I take. I think we need a bit of both, ends of this spectrum, and as they rarely occur in an individual, the best way to do good science is to put people with different approaches together in teams.

      BTW Can you see how the last sentence fits with the “personality traits” I described above – at least I have insight!

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