• Question: Do you spend more time asking yourself questions or making experiments?

    Asked by Martaheras to Tom, Paul, Natasha, Ildiko, Ester, Eoin on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Natasha Myhill

      Natasha Myhill answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Probably more time actually doing the experiments, but thinking of questions is just as important, if not more! I think a good scientist has to be interested and inquisitive about their work. I usually think of a question, plan and carry out an experiment and then spend some time thinking about what the results show – why did that happen? Could it be because of this? How would I prove it?

    • Photo: Ester Gil Vazquez

      Ester Gil Vazquez answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      In my case, I spend far more time asking myself questions, and then I need to select what I am actually going to spend time on answering. That is because a big part of my job is big data analysis – that is basically the analysis LOADS of data, like the genes of hundreds of people, or the mutations in cancer samples. It is so much info that you need a computer to process it for you and give you the bits of info you want to look at (that is, the bits that will answer your questions). When I do experiments I spend far more time trying to answer a specific question and generally I focus on that (although the mind never shuts up).

    • Photo: Paul McKeegan

      Paul McKeegan answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I think more time doing the experiments, but the main thing you get from an experiment is another bunch of questions! For me, it is often ‘what did I do wrong?’ but usually, there are ‘what if?’ questions too!

    • Photo: Ildiko Somorjai

      Ildiko Somorjai answered on 10 Nov 2017:

      I probably spend more time asking questions (or thinking anyway) than doing experiments now. Partly this is because I have my own lab with my own students and so my responsibilities have changed. But this is also partly because I don´t have as much time to do experiments as before (but I wish I did!). That said, it is also sometimes important to “think before you do”. When I was a student I was always in a rush to do experiments to get a result, when actually sometimes thinking carefully (and for some time) will save you trouble and allow you to do the “perfect” experiment on the first try. This is hard for me because I am sometimes a bit impatient to know the answer, but in the long run it can save a lot of wasted time!

    • Photo: Eoin McKinney

      Eoin McKinney answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      I spend more time thinking about questions and ways to find answers to them. Thats a slight luxury as I now have a team of people who help me do experiments, meaning I have more time to spend on the thinking part.>! This might sound like I’m leaving all the hard work to others, but thinking around important questions is the most critical part of science – if we get that bit wrong we’re in trouble no matter how good our experiments might be!

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