• Question: Do you have an analogy to help me understand your work?

    Asked by anon-233378 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 12 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Rebecca Shaw

      Rebecca Shaw answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      I’m quite like a teacher in that I help student researchers carry out their work. I assist in some classes explaining biology concepts to students.

      I also liken myself to a baker and an artist sometimes too! A baker because I mix chemicals (ingredients) and follow a recipe (protocol) to carry out my research.

      An artist because I often do intricate work – working with cells and samples you have to be careful as sometimes they aren’t as sturdy as you might think! And they are often small and difficult to see. I often analyse my samples and cells by painting them colours (actually staining them with substances which are colour tagged that will attach to markers on my areas of interest) and I image them with a microscope and take pictures!

      Does that help? 🙂

    • Photo: Samantha Firth

      Samantha Firth answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      I am like a google translate for science! 🔊📲 I take really complicated science research (full of equations and chemical formulas), pull out all of the important information and translate it from something only expert scientists would understand, into understandable and fascinating snippets of info that everyone can enjoy! E.g. a scientist might make an important discovery that ‘acetaminophen decreases the risk of myocardial infarction’ – What does that mean??? I would translate that to: ‘Paracetamol lowers the risk of heart attacks’ 🌞

    • Photo: Adam Washington

      Adam Washington answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      Think about the average scientist as a detective on a mystery show. They’ve been interviewing suspects, determining motives, and collecting evidence. They’ve been working tirelessly on this one case for weeks, trying to make sure that they catch the right person.

      On that show, I would be the coroner that gets called in. I don’t know nearly as much about the suspects, the crime scene, or the background. However, I can give them information about the cause of death that they can’t find on their own. I can’t tell them what they REALLY want to know (who the murderer is), but I can help them rule out a lot of possibilities. Sometimes the answer if what they already expected. Sometimes the answer is very different. Sometimes I find that the headless body was actually drowned long before being decapitated. They’ll then go back to their mystery and keep searching until the murderer is found. Meanwhile, I’ll be helping out with a dozen other cases at the same time, playing my small part in all of them.

      To peel back the analogy, I’m an expert in performing neutron scattering measurements. Other scientists can use these measurements to help make their own discoveries. I’m often not able to exactly answer the question that they have, but I can rule out certain possibilities. Sometimes the results that I find completely change how they’ve been looking at the problem. But I’m always a small part of many larger projects.

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 12 Nov 2019:


      I put proteins in front of a beam of powerful light to get their shadows. Then I use these shadows to find out the 3D shape of the protein.

      Imagine you take a Pringles can and hold it vertically against a lamp. On the wall, its shadow looks like a rectangle. But on the floor, its shadow looks like a circle. So in my job, I just get to see the rectangle and circle, and I am supposed to figure out that these shadows came from a cylinder. But I don’t work on simple cylinders, proteins have a lot more complicated shapes. So I can’t figure out their shapes from just 2 shadows. Sometimes I need 20,000-1 million shadows in different angles to get the complete detail of every side of that protein.

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