• Question: What has been the most interesting part of your job as a scientist

    Asked by anon-240763 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 10 Mar 2020. This question was also asked by anon-241089.
    • Photo: Tom Dally

      Tom Dally answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Probably trying to plan out new research 🙂 when you’re trying to work out where you want to go next you have read a lot about what other scientists have done before you, which is always really interesting (and a little bit frustrating too, sometimes). Then, once you know what questions you want to ask about the world, you can start planning out experiments to help you answer them. This is always the most interesting part for me.

    • Photo: Emily Goddard

      Emily Goddard answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I like learning about the history of the science I’m doing and finding out what’s been tried before.

      I started to like this when I did my year in industry. I worked for a company that make opiate painkillers (morphine, codeine, oxycodone etc) but as well as learning about the science, I learned a lot about the history too. So how milk from poppies was first used as a painkiller, the opium trade in Victorian times, how different poppy species from different areas contain different opiates. I found it so interesting how the history led us up to where we were there.

      Now in my PhD, I know a lot about heat storage in the past — using ice, hot water, the first person to make a house heated entirely by solar and phase-change materials (she’s called Maria Telkes, and she was amazing!).

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