Question: what inspired you to do experiments and what is your latest experiment

Angela Downie answered on 13 Jul 2020:

I was always a really curious kid, I loved chemistry sets and exploring things, my mum loves to tell a story about me wanting to find out how things burnt differently in a fire… although what I discovered is that fire burns your hand and you shouldn’t play with it! As I grew up through school I still always really enjoyed experiments, so I kept on doing science because I kept on really enjoying it, and I still do!
The last few experiments I have done are something called qRT-PCR, I do a lot of them! The way this experiment works is I am able to collect RNA from cells, RNA has information about all the different bits that your cells are producing, however it way too small to see, even with a microscope. So, in order to investigate what the RNA I collect looks like I have to gather lots of it, clean it up and put it in a machine that will make lots of copies of it. This allows me to find out what bits the cells I am studying are making! It sounds a little complicated but it mainly involves squirting different liquids into a tube!