best experiment you’ve ever done? – MRC Festival Zone 2019

Matthew Bareford answered on 31 May 2019:

Best experiment i’ve ever done would have to be experimenting with different compounds to look at their effects on cancer cells and finding one that made it all the way to clinical trials!!

I got to make the compounds myself, use HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatography) and mass spectrometry to test their purity and then look at their effects on real live cells!

Kaitlin Wade answered on 1 Jun 2019:

There are lots of different scientists – those who work in a lab, those who work out in the natural world and those who work on their computers to solve scientific problems. I’m one of the latter. Whilst I don’t do experiments in the lab or out in the field, which is what you would traditionally think of as an “experiment”, I do use information collected from thousands of people in a way to understand links between things. Like, obesity and cancer or blood pressure and mortality. In a way, the work I do is very much an experiment but without having to actually manipulate anything physically.

The best experiment I’ve ever done was my work that grouped together lots of individual studies to weigh up the evidence they provided about the causal link between obesity and cancer. This work helped determine how much of a detrimental effect obesity has on cancer (it’s now seen as the second most important risk factor for cancer after smoking).

Kate Timms answered on 1 Jun 2019:

The best experiment I ever did was the last one I did as part of my PhD.

Everything I’d done before it made me predict what would happen in the last experiment, but no one had ever shown it before. And, because it was so different to anything anyone had done before, no one believed it would work!

The best feeling was watching that experiment work and realising that my prediction had been right all along.

Rebecca Moon answered on 1 Jun 2019:

I have been working on an experiment that involved over a 1000 pregnant women. Half were given vitamin D and half a dummy (“placebo”) tablet. We then studied there babies to see if they were the same or different in terms of their bones, size and amount of fat and muscle they had. It was a great experiment to be part of because of the sheer size of it and all the participants were great to work with. The children came back to have more scans and measurements when they were 4 years old, which was always quite amusing and fun! And finally getting the results after years of collecting data was really exciting.

Rachel Hardy answered on 1 Jun 2019:

I’ll give a tiny bit of background before I answer (just so you can understand why I found it such a good experiment). I investigate ways in which drugs used to treat brain diseases can cause rare but severe side-effects. Specifically, I look at whether these drugs can cause these bad effects by damaging mitochondria in brain cells. Mitochondria are like tiny energy factories found in most cells of the human body, and produce the majority of energy in these cells. This energy allows a cell to work normally and do its job properly. Therefore, any drug that causes damage to mitochondria will have a very bad affect on brain cells (especially as the brain uses 20% of the energy we make every day!). So, the best experiment I did was when I found drugs that do cause damage to mitochondria. This was at doses which are also found in humans taking these drugs – an important consideration when deciding if findings in experimental cells may also be true in patients. I was also able to pinpoint exactly how these drugs damage mitochondria. To me, this is really interesting as this is a completely new finding for the drugs that I am researching. I feel that it may contribute to drug safety in the future, which achieves my ultimate goal of improving the lives of patients.

Nina Rzechorzek answered on 2 Jun 2019:

Well…depends on what you mean by ‘best’. The most fun I ever had running an experiment was gluing electrodes to peoples’ heads to collect sleep data from them at 5200m in the Bolivian Andes. The most interesting experiments are happening right now…looking at how brain cell clocks keep time in a dish.

Shobhana Nagraj answered on 2 Jun 2019:

Although I have done some laboratory research in the past using experiments, my current research involves working with healthcare workers and pregnant women. This type of research – clinical research, is looking at how healthcare workers can use digital technologies in remote parts of the world to identify and manage pregnant women who have complicated pregnancies.
Worldwide, women still have problems which can be life-threatening during and after childbirth. I use technology to help village healthcare workers prevent these problems for women in very remote areas of the world, where there aren’t many doctors. I love this work, as it exciting to work with technology and train healthcare workers, and really rewarding to see how this might help pregnant women to be looked after in good time, before they face any problems.
The experiment is now to see if the technology will make a difference to the pregnant women or not. We do this by comparing two groups of women – One group of pregnant women have access to the technology, and the other group don’t have access to the technology. This type of experiment is called a clinical trial. I’m hoping we will find a difference and the technology will help the pregnant women!

Matthew Burgess answered on 3 Jun 2019:

I think the first time I ran the full experimental system at my current job after leaving my PhD lab is one that stands out still. It’s easy to not see how far you’ve come as a scientist when you’re so focused on what you next need to achieve.

I am following on from the work someone else had done before me, identifying how injuring the gut induces protective responses in the lung. They proposed that something was entering the blood stream and had done one experiment that showed serum (the non-cell part of blood) from a gut injured mouse could cause similar genes to be expressed in the lungs of another mouse without gut injury.

We next wanted to see if that serum could also protect against lung infection. I had to do the gut injury for the first time, collect serum from those mice (had done that before at least), administer that serum to mice (not done that before), infect them with a lung virus (not done that), then test how much virus was in their lungs (yep, not done that before either).

All this required lots of planning, arranging people to train me how to do the parts I’d not done before, and two long weeks of experiments.

Just doing the experiment successfully and seeing the controls behave as expected was the first time I was able to see how much I’d improved since starting my PhD 4 years prior. There’s no way I would have been able to organise all that when I started my training.

It also helped that the hypothesis was positive and that something in the serum does have antiviral effects. Currently trying to work out what it is.

Marianne King answered on 3 Jun 2019:

It’s taken me until now to make the cells that I need to do experiments on, so sadly I haven’t done any experiments yet really. I like to think of what I’ve done so far as manufacturing (painful, slow, agonising, manufacturing). But one time we put a lump of dry ice into a glove and waited to see how long it’d take to explode – is that an experiment? I should probably say that you shouldn’t try this at home, or at school, or anywhere… If you’re wondering the glove didn’t explode but my friend shouted ‘BANG’ next to me and I screamed anyway.

Ryan Beveridge answered on 3 Jun 2019: last edited 3 Jun 2019 11:11 am

My favourite experiment was one where I was trying to find out why the cells in patients with a particular brain disease were not working like they should.

I was lucky in that other scientists had found out the change in DNA that caused the disease, we were trying to figure what the change did.

This was a lot of work but once we had a good idea what might be happening we were able to get hold of cells from actual patients and try the same experiments. The cells did exactly what we expected them to do.

One of the best things about the set of experiments was that we were looking at the problem from a new way that many people did not think would be right!

If you want a little more detail, the disease was associated with how DNA was repaired but we managed to demonstrate that it was another pathway that was controlling how long different parts of the cells were kept before being recycled.

Deepak Chandrasekharan answered on 3 Jun 2019:

I copied a great experiment/prank I read about on my friend Kate in the lab last year – which was a lot of fun.

I secretly spent weeks slowing down the speed of her computer mouse, one point at a time until it was at it’s slowest, before speeding it up to maximum one day and watching (trying not to giggle) as she struggled to click on stuff!

As each time you’re slowing it down only a small amount compared with the current speed of the mouse, people don’t actually realise it’s been slowing down and will automatically learn to move at this ‘new’ setting using a part of the brain called the cerebellum. ( Here’s the science bit explaining ‘just noticeable differences’ https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber-Fechner_law )

When you speed it up again, the difference is large and as they’re used to working with the slow mouse speed, they overshoot the icons! Luckily (for me as Kate got a bit annoyed but also did find it funny!) they adapt again pretty quickly.

Thiloka Ratnaike answered on 3 Jun 2019:

Best experiment- staining muscle tissue in order to check whether there was a problem with that muscle tissue in terms of the energy supply functions. This was my best experiment because I truly had to take time to understand the steps in the process after watching the senior researcher perform it in the lab. I also had to get the ethical approval to collect the muscle tissue from patients who had a disease that caused problems with their muscle. So it was a long process actually getting to the stage of doing the actual experiment. You could feel the relief I had through the lab when it all worked!

Ettie Unwin answered on 5 Jun 2019:

I don’t really do typical experiments. I solve equations using computers and then interpret the results, so all my experiments are just putting numbers into a computer and waiting days somethings. In my undergraduate course I had to run physical experiments and they were always going wrong so I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

During my PhD I was trying to code up some very complicated theory and apply it to a real life situation. I was very happy when I got a straight line with my results and I showed the theory was very applicable and I have written the code write!

David Wilson answered on 6 Jun 2019: last edited 6 Jun 2019 9:54 am

The next one is always going to be the best one! 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 The majority of the cells in your liver are called hepatocytes but i’m interested in a really small group called cholangiocytes, these are the ones that make your bile ducts in the liver. I found that I couldn’t really look at the cholangiocytes easily because there were so many hepatocytes so I worked out a way to remove the cholangiocytes specifically to look at them, it was a bit tricky but it hadn’t really been done before and it’s helped us a lot in a lot of other experiments we’ve done since then.

Question: best experiment you've ever done?

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