• Question: Have you ever been responsible for a scientific breakthrough or discovery of any sort?

    Asked by LilySiobhanReigate1709 to Kylie, Matt, Bex, RobB, Sam on 13 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Matt Dunn

      Matt Dunn answered on 13 Jun 2016:

      For my MSc work I was in a lab in Spain where I studied a disease called Friedreich’s ataxia. Long story short, the work I did in that lab helped contribute to a discovery about the disease, where the work got published and shown all over the world!

      Publications are the main way to show discoveries and developments in your work, so as a scientist every publication in a scientific journal is a personal breakthrough!

    • Photo: Kylie Belchamber

      Kylie Belchamber answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Yes, I have published a couple of papers now, each showing something new that we didn’t know before! It’s awesome to see your work out there for the world to see.

      I’m currently writing about 5 papers about different new discoveries, all small but important in their own way. For example, in one of them, we took blood and sputum (mucus) samples from 500 people, and did some fancy analysis of the proteins they contain (called cytokines) and found a different between people with really bad disease, and people with less bad disease. This might help us to design better treatments for people with really bad disease, so that’s awesome!

Comments