Question: What is the best breakthrough you've had?

Liza Selley answered on 19 Jun 2018:

Hi rmb28,

In science the best breakthroughs are often the ones that are most useful to mankind. For me, that would have to be finding out that we can study how lungs react to pollution by measuring molecules in the urine. This is useful because before that we would need to take out bits of people’s lungs to see how the pollution had affected them. Unsurprisingly, not many people are happy to do this for science experiments so it was difficult to study the problem.

Urine is a different story though, it doesn’t hurt to pee in a cup so we can use my new technique to see whether people are having bad reactions to air pollution or not. This will help us to understand why some people react more badly to exposure than others and figure out ways to help them.