What was your favorite experiment to conduct?

Samuel Ellis answered on 7 Jan 2022:

One of the more complicated but rewarding experiments I used to perform used real bits of human gut lining as an infection model. We worked with a hospital and asked patients who were having endoscopy (where a camera on a long flexible tube is used to look for problems like cancer inside a person) if the doctors could take an extra sample for research. We then treated these very small pieces of real tissue with our bacteria and used an electron microscope to look at if and how they attached, on a tiny scale! A very tricky experiment to learn, but gave some amazing images and information on how dangerous bacteria can grow in our intestines.

Jonny Coates answered on 9 Jan 2022:

Anything I do with microscopes I really love! There is something about being able to see things happen in real time that is awe-inspiring. One of my favourite experiments was actually when I was an undergraduate and so it was just learning but we had a blood sample and we added clotting factors to it. Watching how quickly the blood clotted was terrifying but also amazing. It’s these simple kind of experiments that I like the most because they easily reveal how awesome science really is.

John Tulloch answered on 10 Jan 2022:

I do not really do experiments in the classic sense. I collect data about people’s health and then analyse it using statistics to try and identify any patterns (I especially love making maps). One of my favourite things I did was to identify that Twitter can be used to spot potential disease outbreaks!

Jenny Hill answered on 10 Jan 2022:

Lots of experiments have given me interesting results, but there’s not a lot to look at! I’ll load a sample which I have carefully prepared into a machine, and then the output is a file of numbers which I then analyse and interpret. So some of the more fun experiments to conduct are those when you can see something that gives you a sense of the outcome of the experiment with your own eyes. I like plating out samples onto agar plates and incubating them in order to grow any bacteria that are present in the sample into little blob-like colonies on the plate. This can be a step in lots of experiments. I’ve done it to look at the immune responses of participants in a vaccine trial. I added bacteria into blood samples to see how well the antibodies present in the blood can kill the bacteria. If the participant has made a good immune response I’ll count very few bacterial colonies on the agar plate, at the end of the experiment and if they’ve responded weakly then I’ll see lots of colonies have grown. Fortunately a machine can count up the colonies to save us time.

Chris Budd answered on 11 Jan 2022:

I do a lot of computer experiments when I run mathematical models on a super computer to try to predict the future. My favourite work I think is my work on climate change. One thing I do is to run experments to try to predict when the next ice age will occur.

Melanie Krause answered on 13 Jan 2022:

That is a lovely question! 🙂
Similar to what other people have said I really like experiments where I can ‘see’ what is happening by looking under the microscope. In my PhD I was looking at different proteins and how they behave during infection. I found one that always enters the nucleus (where the DNA is stored), when the cell becomes infected with vaccinia virus. The mechanism of why and how that happened ended up being my PhD project, so seeing that for the first time was probably my favourite thing.

Question: What was your favorite experiment to conduct?

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