• Question: whats your biggest discovery?

    Asked by parishope to Carys, Chris, Jeremy, Katherine, Simone on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by vikk, jamesftw, benandizaak, thebeatles, samandaashishlgs, mattkp, benandajay10.
    • Photo: Simone Bijvoet

      Simone Bijvoet answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi parishope,
      Since I’ve only just started doing research recently, I wouldn’t want to say I have had a real big discovery yet.

      However, I think a big discovery for me personally was when I realized I was quit good at explaining statistics to people (a type of math used a lot in science). At the moment I am helping a lot of people with their research and I think it’s quite cool that I can help other people explaining their big discoveries in a way. 🙂

      Hope this answers your question a bit.
      Simone

    • Photo: Carys Cook

      Carys Cook answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hmmm…my research is starting to reveal answers to some questions that have long puzzled paleoclimatologists – no one before has been able to show that some areas of the East Antarctic ice sheet were vulnerable to climate change in the past, but my results that I will be showing fellow scientists to a conference in a few weeks time show that one particular area may be very vulnerable to melting…I hope to spend some of my life revealing some more discovery’s about Antarctica’s ice sheets!

    • Photo: Katherine Jones

      Katherine Jones answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I have worked on some medicines that are still being trialled on patients to see if they work. But nothing that is actually a medicine for sure, yet! It takes about 10 years between someone like me making a new medicine and it having all the safety checks, and tests to see if it works well enough, before it can be sold.

    • Photo: Jeremy Green

      Jeremy Green answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      My biggest discovery so far has been that cells in embryos use certain chemicals called “morphogen growth factors” as a kind of satnav GPS navigation system. Every cell is programmed to respond differently to different concentrations of morphogen growth factor. If there is a source of growth factor and its concentration gets weaker and weaker the further away you are from the source, then cells will make different tissue types at different distances. This knowledge is one of the things that makes using stem cells possible.

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