Question: What inspired you to start studying venomous snakes?

Adam Hargreaves answered on 20 Jun 2017:

Hi Joanna,
I’d always been interested in venomous snakes from watching documentaries since I was a kid, but never thought I’d get to work with them. In fact it never really occurred to me that people actually studied their venom, especially in the UK. For my undergraduate degree I studied tropical disease biology at the University of Liverpool, which was mainly focused on things like Malaria, but for my final project there was one advertised in the venom research lab. I had never heard of the venom research lab, let alone knew there were hundreds of venomous snakes in the building where I had lectures! The project sounded really interesting so I sent an email right away (hoping nobody had beaten me to it) and managed to get it.
From there I think there were 2 things which really secured things. The first was my supervisor, who was incredibly passionate not just about the animals but about the science of everything I was doing. That got me really interested into knowing how things work and how we can use different techniques to find different things out. The second thing was during one of the venom extraction sessions (there were quite a few per week), my supervisor and the herpetologist who looked after the snakes secured a saw-scaled viper and let me feel what it felt like. I think those 2 events put the science and the animals together and from then I was hooked!