• Question: do any of you do exciting experiments? If so what sort of experiments??

    Asked by elliexoxo to David, Eva, Kate, Nicholas, Rachel on 11 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by 568rhed42, ronaldmcdonald.
    • Photo: Rachel McMullan

      Rachel McMullan answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      Hi
      I like to think that all my experiments are exciting because hopefully they’ll tell me something new but sometimes experiments can be quite repetitive. My favourite ones involve looking at fluorescent worms under the microscope. We can label single cells using something called Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). I think it’s really exciting being able to see an individual brain cell in a living animal! Here’s a link to a picture so you can see what I mean;

    • Photo: Nicholas Pearce

      Nicholas Pearce answered on 12 Nov 2015:

      Hey Ellie,

      I do lots of exciting chemical reactions. I don;t always know what will happen when i mix the chemicals together, but so far nothing has gone wrong.
      Here’s a video of an exciting reaction I did involving a jelly baby:
      http://s1194.photobucket.com/user/nicholaspearce1/media/VID_20150302_162606312_zpszthdjreu.mp4.html?sort=2&o=1

    • Photo: David Nunan

      David Nunan answered on 13 Nov 2015:

      Not exciting in terms of mixing stuff together and making it blow up or change colour or smell funny!

      But I do run ‘experiments’ of drugs and other treatments in real life patients. These are called clinical trials. They are basically the last step in a long process that involves many of the different aspects of science.

      For example first you will have the drug being made (sometimes from plants) in a laboratory using chemicals and test tubes. Then the drug will be tested on bacteria or microbes again in a lab. it then gets tested on animals to see what the safe doses are. If it passes all these then it gets to be tested in human subjects.

      First it’s tested in a small number of patients to see how they react. This is called a phase 1 clinical trial. If it’s safe then it’s tested in a bigger sample of people (about 200) who have the disease that the drug is meant to treat. This is a phase 2 trial. If it is shown to work it then has to go through another trial (phase 3) in even more patients (1000’s). If it works after all this then the drug can be approved to be given to everyone who has the disease.

      You can see this is a long process – it takes on average 14 years for a new drug to go from a chemistry lab to being allowed to be given to real patients!!

      Here’s a nice video explaining all of this: https://vimeo.com/68702006

Comments