Question: Do you feel like all the fields of science (chemistry, biology and physics) are connected? Or are they very seperate from each other? Do you feel like your reasearch in one field will help another field?

Mark Basham answered on 17 Nov 2011:

hi nancyc,

At Diamond we have all kinds of scientists and even engineers and archaeologists who come to use the equipment. Now especially with modern experiments the complexity of preforming them is really high, and no one person could possibly have all the knowledge and skills to do every part of an experiment. We all have to work together otherwise nothing would get done!

An example of this is a field called Protein Crystallography. A Biologist will identify some protein which they are really interested in, and then either them or another biologist or chemist will spend some (maybe even years) trying to prepare a sample of that protein which can be used for the experiment. Once prepared they will bring it to diamond, where a 500 meter partial accelerator( designed and build run by physicists (Like Peter) and engineers) will generate really bright x-rays, which will be focussed using lots of cool technology (more physicists and engineers) until it hits the carefully prepared sample (destroying it in a few minutes usually!) and then the collected data is analysed using software written by more biologists, chemists, physicists and computer scientists, until they have a result which they can use to solve the biological problem.

Hope this answers the question