• Question: What has been the worst thing that has gone wrong in your job? ie. Experiments gone wrong ? :)

    Asked by emiiwilde to Hermine, Katy, Laura, Nathalie, Paula on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by borat.
    • Photo: Paula Salgado

      Paula Salgado answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi emiiwilde and borat

      Well, I was once trying to understand how the proteins of particular virus interact with human proteins to cause skin cancer. As we normally do, we were trying to use bacterial cells to prepare lots and lots of protein.
      After several attempts, we realized these proteins could not be produced in bacterial cells because they lost their natural shape (or structure), which was exactly what we wanted to study. Since we didn’t have the technology to prepare the proteins using other methods, we just decided to use other techniques to understand how the virus causes cancer. We changed tactics. 😉

      Sometimes experiments go wrong or just don’t work. In those situations, you first try to understand why it went wrong. You then try again, changing the conditions you thought caused to go wrong. Sometimes that even means changing experiments completely!

      As long as you can use a negative result to move your research forward and find new and better ways of doing thing,s it’s all part of the job! 😉

    • Photo: Nathalie Pettorelli

      Nathalie Pettorelli answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Hi there,

      People getting hurt in the field – that’s the worst thing that can happen. Field work in conservation biology sometimes implies spending weeks in remote areas full of potentially dangerous animals such as big cats, snakes, buffalos, tse tse flies, mosquitoes with malaria – and of course this means that there is a risk of being hurt. Several colleagues have died in the field (plane crash while surveying national parks, house falling down during storms), some caught nasty diseases and had to be evacuated – that’s to me the worst thing that can happen in my job

    • Photo: Laura Dixon

      Laura Dixon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      My very first experiment during my PhD was a bit of a disaster and as I was just starting out, very discouraging as well. Nothing at all seemed to go right – we had trouble finding a place to conduct the research and trouble finding chickens we could use which delayed my starting for a few months. When things finally got going, I was video recording chickens in different environments to see changes in their behaviour and the video equipment kept randomly shutting on and off so I ended up losing a bunch of data. Luckily the rest of my PhD went better but that first experiment always sticks out in my mind as a frustrating time 😛

    • Photo: Katy Mee

      Katy Mee answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Well i don’t really work in a lab so i haven’t had any experiments that went wrong but my tent nearly blew away in a storm once! I wasn’t in it – if i had been it probably wouldn’t have moved anywhere but as there was one solitary toilet roll in the tent there was nothing to weigh it down so it ripped off the anchors and blew a few hundred yards away before snagging on some rocks. It took a while to find it though!

    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Not finding a solution to solve a problem. This has not happened yet. Normally if you have enough time and money you can solve all the problems in the world. Even the BP oil spill problem. Unfortunately for them they are fighting with time and time is something you cannot control, you can but only try to measure it accurately.

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