• Question: do you create your own experiments or do people suggest what to do?

    Asked by adebayorisagod to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 7 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      It’s a bit of a mixture of both! Sometimes you have a set target and your boss will suggest a way of doing it, sometimes you are following someone else’s work and trying to improve it, and sometimes you have to think for yourself and find a completely different way of doing something.

      The reason I was asked to work on the books was because I became very good at running the machine that takes the measurements – this was because the crystals I made would fall to pieces if they were moved from the solution I grew them in, so there was no way of using any standard method that required touching them or moving them, and they were barely big enough to see with a microscope – so I used the Raman machine and was able to identify them through the glass bottle they were grown in, something nobody else had thought to try.

      With the books we had a ‘shopping list’ of pages to look at suggested by our history expert, but we also tried other techniques to find the answers, and looked at other pages if they had pigments on.

    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      A bit of both.

      I’m trying to adapt known materials to find the materials best at doing a certain job – taking up carcinogenic chromium. This means I start by making known materials and then I try new things on them. For the starting materials, I use experimental instructions or “recipes” that other people have published because they worked well. I choose what materials I will make and which recipes, and sometimes my supervisor suggests new ideas for me.

      It seems I accumulate a lot of information and mix it together in a new way. This is like if you make pancakes or yorkshire puddings. The starting ingredients are the same, but changing something small like the way you cook it can give very different results.

    • Photo: Nicola Rogers

      Nicola Rogers answered on 8 Mar 2014:

      I always design my own experiments, yes, but sometimes I do experiments to find things out that I want to know, and often I discuss my project with other researchers and we discuss what experiments are needed to prove or disprove certain ideas.

    • Photo: Roy Adkin

      Roy Adkin answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hello 🙂
      Well it depends on what I want to know or end up with.
      If I want to make a molecule with a certain shape or atoms in certain places I can design an experiment starting with very simple molecules and react them together, I’d then take that molecule and react it with something else to get another molecule a bit closer to the shape I want. This process keeps going until I get to my target molecule. It’s a bit like building with Lego. You have small pieces which you keep adding together (and taking bits away from) until you get the model you want. It is massively more complicated than that to actually do but it really is that simple. Quite often there are experiments already completed by other scientists which will tell you roughly the right temperature, reaction times and what molecules to start off with…then you just tweak the conditions to get it right.
      If I want to know how a molecule will interact with another molecule I need to design an experiment to measure it. In the case of my project I want to see if molecules change the light that is emitted by my fluorescent sensor so I need to mix the two together and measure the light. I design the experiment but the equipment is already designed from experiments other people have undertaken.
      As a research scientist we most often work on projects based on the work of others or use other peoples work as inspiration. Science is, or should be, collaborative…we all work together. The point I am trying to make is that most often we create our own experiments but we draw on ideas and concepts started by others to help us do that.
      I hope that answers you question 🙂

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