• Question: What is the single most thing that you enjoy about your work?

    Asked by yabba to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 16 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Doing experiments! I love desgining and performing my own work, and analysing the results to see if my hypothesis is right, and then figuring ou the next step.

    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Hi again yabba,
      Another great question!
      I think my favourite thing is telling people about what I do and what it’s like to be a scientist – kind of what I’m doing right now here!
      I like to give talks and presentations to various groups and schools and promote science as an interesting and fun thing to do.. as well as being a nice job.
      I also do a lot of teaching which is along the smae line – communicating with people about my science is fun!

      Eoin

    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Hi Yabba

      What I really enjoy is the cycle of question-experiment-answer-question-experiment-answer…..etc! The most difficult part of being a scientist, at least in the kind of work I do, is knowing what question to ask. The big questions are easy and obvious, like, can we find a cure for blindness. But then you have to ask, which type of blindness, and then, which type of cell shall we look at, and then, what can we do to those cells that will tell us things about the disease? Eventually you decide on the experiment you need to do to answer the question. This is usually quite easy. The experiment gives you a result, and more often than not, it makes you ask another question. And so the cycle continues. I really enjoy this cycle of thinking about things, doing some work, and then moving on. It has a momentum of its own that carries you with it.

    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Discovering things that none has ever known before.

      Science as a whole is the job of adding new layers to that knowledge all the time. 120 years ago we didn’t know what caused malaria. 75 years ago we didn’t have any good, cheap drugs to treat it. 15 years ago, we didn’t know the full genome sequence, didn’t know all the genes that it takes to make a malaria parasite. No bigger thrill than to be the people adding the next layer of discovery to the mountain of scientific achievement.

    • Photo: Charlie Ryan

      Charlie Ryan answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      hi yabba thanks for the Q.
      The thing i enjoy most about my work?? Well i guess it has to be the excitement of getting things working, after many frastrating hours! Take my day today for instance. I set up a rocket for a test ion a vacuum chamber (which simulates the space envirnment), and finished the setup, and get it ready by 10am. But it wasn’t till 4pm that it worked, which meant some long hours of frustration! But when it begines to work, and you start collecting data that is the best feeling!!

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