• Question: have discover anything instresting when beening a scientist ?xxx

    Asked by kerrymacmillan to MarkF, Mark, Michael, Panos, Sarah on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Panos Soultanas

      Panos Soultanas answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Yes, I have done some great work in the field of DNA helicases. These are the enzymes that unwind the double helix of the DNA and reveal the sequence of the DNA. I (and colleagues) discovered the mechanism of action of a DNA helicase.

    • Photo: Sarah Burl

      Sarah Burl answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I have cloned a sheep!
      I have also discovered that responses to the BCG vaccine for TB in Gambian children can be good at first but that it doesn’t last very long and that if you vaccinate at a slightly different time you get a different response to the vaccine.

      I have also discovered that lots of people around me earn a lot more money than me but I am the only person who really loves their job!

    • Photo: Mark Travis

      Mark Travis answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      The most interesting thing we have discovered when being a scientist is a key role for a particular set of molecules in preventing inflammatory bowel disease.
      Did you know we have around 100 trillion bacteria living in or intestine? These are very important in helping us keep heathly and digest food. But, the immune system is always poised to attack bacteria that enter the body that may cause us harm. So, how does the immune system know how to attack harmful bacteria that infect us, but ignore the ‘good’ bacteria that lives in the gut? When this regulation doesn’t work properly, the immune system attacks our own body, and causes inflammatory bowel disease. We have identified an important pathway that prevents this from happening.

    • Photo: Mark Fogg

      Mark Fogg answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      I like to think so.
      I found out how a specific molecule, a protein, in a bug can stop the bacterium getting mutations that could kill it. It was also known that the protein, from other properties it had, could be used in Molecular Biology labs as a ‘Molecular Tool’. I managed to make large amounts of this protein and extract it from the bug in a very pure form. It is now sold by a company and used by scientists in labs all over the world to help them do their work. It even got fired into space on a Space Shuttle, to see if zero gravity might help with working out what it looked like.

    • Photo: Michael Loughlin

      Michael Loughlin answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      lots of things more since i have been teaching different subjects like bacteria cab survive for a quarter of a billion years in hibernation, that witout fungi there woudl be no chocolate or coffee , how some bacteria if scaled up would move faster than a jet, though noit with a good sense of direction, how bacteria eat oilslicks, that a bag of sugar in weight of us is bacteria, that funguses can infect ants, turn them into “zombies” and make them climb up high so when their heads explode and release fungal spores..they can spread a huge distance
      so the answer is yes.

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