• Question: whats your biggest discovery?

    Asked by anon-255474 on 21 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-257247, anon-257253.
    • Photo: Sabrina Slater

      Sabrina Slater answered on 21 May 2020:

      Hey Kaya!
      My biggest discovery is probably finding 6 completely new toxins made by the bacteria in your guts. They all have pretty boring names unfortunately, and we’re still trying to figure out exactly what the toxins do to the human body. But it’s a pretty cool finding! We hope it can help us fight back against bacteria.

    • Photo: Alex Holmes

      Alex Holmes answered on 21 May 2020: last edited 21 May 2020 12:16 pm

      what a question! It’s not really science related, but my biggest discovery was that even the smartest people have to ask for help or don’t understand things – it completely changed my mindset about what counts as being smart or clever and helped me feel more confident talking to people.

    • Photo: Emma Daniels

      Emma Daniels answered on 21 May 2020:

      I’m not long into my PhD and my lab has been shutdown for a while, so I haven’t had many ‘eureka’ moments. But, last year I made a compound that nobody had made before and that was really cool! Although it’s really cheesy, one of my biggest discoveries that I make all the time is when I realise I can do an experiment/reaction that seemed really difficult at first. I’ve found doing research lets you discovery a lot about yourself, as well as discovering stuff about your research.

    • Photo: Eleanor Williams

      Eleanor Williams answered on 21 May 2020:

      I’m working on a genetic disease called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva – or FOP for short. It causes muscle to be replaced by bone and you get locked in place like a human statue. It’s really rare with only 40 patients in the UK with it. It’s caused by only one protein going wrong – the normal ‘make bone’ signal that it gives is slightly hyperactive so signals when it shouldn’t. There’s currently no cure.

      My big discovery was finding a medicine that bound to this protein and seemed to stop bone being formed in FOP models that we had. The really exciting thing about this medicine was that it had already been designed to treat cancer (although it turned out it wasn’t very good at doing that) so had already been shown to be safe in humans. This means we can put it straight into trials with actual FOP patients to see if it works on curing the disease. Unfortunatly this trial has been paused while the covid-19 crisis is on but hopefully at some point it will start up again and we’ll see if what we saw in the lab translates to people.

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