• Question: Why do you do crazy experiments on animals and humans ?

    Asked by anon-195798 to Kevin, Hannah on 28 Jan 2019.
    • Photo: Kevin Daly

      Kevin Daly answered on 28 Jan 2019:

      It’s not that crazy! I’m interested in learning about processes that occurred thousands of years ago, that we wouldn’t know anything about otherwise. How did the early farmers change wild goat to produce domestic goat (even if they didn’t deliberately do it)? Did ancient goat get brought by migrants when they moved, or when long-distance trading began? Did domestic goat mix with other species of wild goat? These are interesting questions that ancient DNA can best answer, and tell us something about humans too.

    • Photo: Hannah Currant

      Hannah Currant answered on 29 Jan 2019:

      Following on from Kevin, the experiments are not all that crazy. In actual fact, I don’t really do experiments ON humans, but rather WITH them, and their data. We ask people to volunteer to take part and get their permission to use data such as their DNA information in our experiments. There’s lots of rules in place to make sure that scientists are not doing any experiments that are too crazy or unethical and that is an important part of science.

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