• Question: What is your best work

    Asked by zoe1999 to Norman, Laura, Nicola, Sandra, Thanasis on 14 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by 09lomash, chloeh1999, qirett22.
    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Ooh tricky question, I think that the best work I have done was where I showed how you can figure out how big the brains of different fossils are. I think this was good because now lots of people can use it to find out lots of other things about how animal brains evolved, so it has helped other researchers to learn more.

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      My best work (so far!) showed how a disease spread over a new area because of the landscape. The area had never had this infectious disease before, but it was introduced to the area because some cows were brought in which had the disease. Then it started spreading to people in the area. At first, all the people were in a small part of the area, but over the next 4 years the disease spread further, affecting people over a much larger area. So my work showed that the disease was moving into areas with certain types of habitat rather than just randomly over the area. Not many people have looked at that before!

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 15 Mar 2013:

      One of my favourite days was when a patient was under general anaesthetic because she had to have a breast removed because of cancer. A piece of the breast was rushed to me in the lab, I had to X ray it, confirm micro-calcification, then cut a frozen section.

      A frozen section is when we freeze the tissue is very very cold liquid nitrogen, this makes it really hard, then I had to cut a really thin ribbon, put it on a microscope slide and stain it. The whole thing took about 12 minutes. The pathologist looked at the slide to make sure there were cancerous cells present in the very edge of the tissue – this is called ‘margins’. There weren’t, which meant only some of her breast tissue needed to be removed, instead of all of it like it was first thought. It was a good day for the patient.

      I think just about all of the work I do I can say is my best work – if it wasn’t my best work then that must mean the techincal is poor, and if it’s poor then it can had a bad affect on a patient’s diagnosis. And so I cannot have anything than best work.

      The work of any biomedical scientist daily has to be their best work, the diagnosis is completely reliant on our techincal skills and interpretive abilities. We can’t be shoddy, lazy or shabby or someone maybe be seriously injured or worse…

      It comes naturally to us, we have such a good understanding of the technical side that we monitor ourselves as we’re going along – we know if the staining is off, or needs changing, we know how to adjust a test if need be.

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