• Question: when did you first show an intrest in science and where do you see yourself in 10 years time?

    Asked by wlea to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by beckiie, jejones, rarr, poppy4lifiebabex, salvatore, niamh21.
    • Photo: Steve Roser

      Steve Roser answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I was a really bratty youth who wanted to be a scientist from about 10 years old. I loved all that bangs and flashes stuff. In ten years time, I will probably be retired, and want to be one of those great old scientist that I know a few of who can sit down with the young ‘uns and when they ask questions I can say…’aaah! I remember back in good old 1927 there was an experiment which i did which etc etc….’

    • Photo: Tom Hartley

      Tom Hartley answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I think I first showed an interest in science at a very young age; I can’t remember not being interested in how things work. I was born in 1967 a couple of years before the Moon landings, so I would have watched them (I can’t really remember except for a few fuzzy sounds and images). I watched Dr Who avidly – things like time travel really got my cogs whirring. My favourite toy was a robot. I started to get interested in science programmes on TV, for example at one stage I was obsessed by David Bellamy who had a programme called Bellamy on Botany (mainly about bog plants as I remember). I watched James Burkes’ Connections and David Attenborough’s Life on Earth.

      In ten years time, I hope I am still working as a scientist and if things work out for me, I would want to be in charge of a small research team. Ten years is a long time in neuroimaging. By then there will be all sorts of new technologies we can barely imagine now – for instance it might be possible to image the brain in much finer detail or more quickly, or to see how specific molecules move around in the human brain as we learn and remember. There will be new analytical methods which will enable us to make more sense of the patterns we see.

    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I remember being interested in science when I was about 6, doing a school project on Mars. I loved it – the red planet! I was amazed and enthralled about the planets and have been ever since – I went onto study astronomy at university I loved it so much.

      10 years time…a science presenter on TV!

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hi Wlea – I remember being obsessed with space and space rockets when I was in primary school (at about age 10) so that might have been the start of it. I kept up an interest all through secondary school.

      Though I only studied Physics and maths at A level and physics at university, I got really interested in biophysics at the end of my degree when I learned about the work that Max Perutz did to figure out the structure of a molecule called haemoglobin. The red blood cells in your blood are stuffed with haemoglobin – it grabs oxygen from the air in your lungs and carries it to all parts of the body.

      What amazed me about Perutz’s work was that it revealed haemoglobin to be an incredibly sophisticated nano-machine! From then on I was hooked. Never looked back.

      !0 years is a long time – I hope then we would be working on even more challenging problems (assuming the UK has enough money left to spend on science!). One of the high ambitions I have is to figure out how foot-and-mouth disease virus makes copies of its genome in infected cells.

    • Photo: Pete Edwards

      Pete Edwards answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      My dad says that ever since I could talk I was always asking him questions about things around me – Why is grass green? How big is the Earth, What’s the Sun made of? Things like that. I realised at school that science was about trying to answer a lot of the questions that most interested me so I studied as much science as I could. I took biology, chemistry and physics as single sciences to GCSE. When I started my A levels I wasn’t sure if I was going to study marine biology or physics at uni and I only decided I was going to do physics at the end of my AS year.
      In ten years time I’ll be retired and I hope to be lying on a beach having just had a morning snorkel somewhere warm!

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