• Question: Have you made any improvements/discoveries in the world of toxicology?

    Asked by mariablancocarol to Anais, katy, Lauren, Richard, Stuart on 11 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by mireia.ferrer, Lula Farguell.
    • Photo: Lauren Laing

      Lauren Laing answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      I haven’t made any big discoveries, I am still in the early stages of my career as a scientist. However, in the first week of my PhD some of my research was published in a scientific journal. This means that our findings are now available for other scientists to read, it has also added to the body of knowledge on the topic. This is one of the important things about being a scientist, once you have collected data, it is written up and submitted to be published. This is a way of sharing our findings with other scientists, and allowing then to criticize and examine them.

    • Photo: Anais Kahve

      Anais Kahve answered on 13 Mar 2016:

      Some of my previous research showed that a chemical compound hoped to be used as a cancer therapy caused genotoxicity in mice. This means that the compound made changes to the DNA in the cells of the mice. But whether this would happen in humans is not known. But more tests need to be done to figure this out and to see if the drug is safe enough to be given to humans. My current research is looking at the toxicity of fatty acids in different cells types. I am also hoping to figure out how fatty acids get inside cells as there is a lot of controversy and debate about how this process occurs.

    • Photo: Richard Friend

      Richard Friend answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      Not in toxicology, but some of the chemicals I was working on in uni were investigated for use for hydrogen storage, and they got written up in a paper. It was really cool making things and then finding out the exact structure of the crystals by firing x rays at them, we got to look at 3D images of them!

    • Photo: Stuart Atkinson

      Stuart Atkinson answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      All my discoveries were made in the course of my PhD research. Like Richard I was looking at crystal structures, and also how they changed under extreme temperatures. This was exciting as I got to use a particle accelerator, a neutron source and also X-ray generators to zap my samples and work where all the atoms were positions in the crystal. Best of all was that I found new materials that were not known to exist. So I was able to put this information into scientific papers and share it with other people.

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