• Question: whats your favorite part of your job?

    Asked by anon-175882 to Thomas, hayleypincott, David on 8 Jun 2018. This question was also asked by anon-175898.
    • Photo: Hayley Pincott

      Hayley Pincott answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      I love doing specimen dissection because this is when you really get to see amazing (although sometimes slightly gory) things. This is the moment we can start to understand a patients condition. For example specimen dissection for a cancer case is quite complex so the pathologist will come and firstly describe the tissue, this is because the appearance of the tissue will change loads during the various processes we put it through in the lab and also because basically we’re going to cut it up so we need to know what it was like before we did that. The pathologist will then take certain bits of tissue to see how big the tumour is and see if there are clear margins, all this means is to make sure the cancer is at least 5mm away from the edge of the lump of tissue.

      Doing dissection for smaller things is quicker and requires less work so these cases are our routine work, although they can include biopsies for cancer.

      I’m very lucky to work with pathologists who are very keen to teach and explain everything and I’m forever annoying them with my questions, so for me dissection is my favourite part because this is where I learn the most.

    • Photo: David Mills

      David Mills answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      I love being the first person to see something. Whether I’m looking at teeth and bones, or old scrolls, quite often we have no idea what’s inside.

      Sometimes you get a tooth that looks perfectly normal on the outside, but is a fascinating study in abnormal structure on the inside. Or we may get an old scroll, or letter that no one has seen the inside of for several hundred years – in the case of the sealed letters, no one has ever seen the content but the person that wrote it.

      For the deeper analysis of the tooth, or the letter I have to hand the images over to colleagues that are the experts on that field, but I was still the first person to see it!

    • Photo: Thomas Perriment

      Thomas Perriment answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      It has to be investigating an area we know nothing about! Sometimes humans have to build somewhere no one has really looked at before, and what’s on the surface doesn’t always tell you what’s underground. Whatever you want to build, whether it’s a skyscraper or a tunnel, you have to know what’s underground – we’ve all seen the leaning Tower of Pisa! Investigating something new is so much fun because you really have to connect the dots, you never get to see the full picture and sometimes it’s hard to know whether you’re on the right track or whether you’re way off.

      Landscapes such as forests and deserts change over time, and with the world constantly evolving like this it’s a challenge to understand how the earth might react to a new building on top of a it, or a new hole underneath it. So when we are planning something in an undeveloped area, we have to take little pieces of information and put them together to develop out understanding of the ground conditions, just like a jigsaw puzzle!

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