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Asked by anon-254370 to Vanessa on 13 May 2020.
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Vanessa Ward answered on 13 May 2020: last edited 13 May 2020 12:27 pm
Hi Tias,
One of the most challenging things is getting enough money to pay for the materials needed to do the research and pay for your own time to do the work. A scientist can have brilliant ideas but to be able to carry out the research they need the equipment and reagents/chemicals to do the work. This involves writing a plan of what you want to do, why, how long it will take and how much it will cost. The plans are sent to the charities and research councils who fund research and they decide which plans they think are best and give them the money. This takes a lot of time and research, just to get the money needed to do the experiments.Although this is a challenge, it makes scientists really think about why they want to do the research and what the experiments will tell us, so the money is spent in the best way.
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Comments
Ellie commented on :
Hi Tias,
I think another challenge is patience. Sometimes experiments don’t work, things go wrong or and experiment needs lots of repeats or to be tweaked until it works properly. This can take a lot of time and be very fiddly and occasionally frustrating. You need to be able to repeat the same thing again and again to be sure that the answer you get is the right one and that it gives you a result you can trust and that other people can trust. Sometimes this means you get to the end of a week and the whole weeks worth of work turns out to be useless and you have to do the whole thing again the week after and you’ve got to be prepared for that. It doesn’t always happen – sometimes things work well first time and only need some easy repeats and sometimes things are quick to get right but for the tricky bits you need to have the patience to keep going.
Gavin commented on :
Time – there is never enough time to research all the things that you want to know.