• Question: Do you do more experiments or more research and why ?

    Asked by jazmin12 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Not sure there’s a difference really. I guess you could say a bunch of experiments roll up into a “body of research”. If I had to tease this apart I’d say “experiment” refers to one thing you do to find out a single fact, whereas “research” might be read as a whole set of experimental things you need to do to find out the answer to a bigger problem and test out your major questions (hypotheses, to use the jargon)…

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      We do research by doing experiments! ‘Research’ is what we call the activity of finding out more new information about a topic, and we can only find new information by carrying out tests (which are experiments) to see what the answer is to our questions. For example, I’m doing research into whether a kind of drug will make immune cells better or worse at killing cancer cells. So I do an experiment by putting my immune cells, cancer cells and the drug all together, and see if there are more or less cancer cells left at the end!

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Like PB and Lyn have said research consists of doing experiments to prove that our theory is correct or not and answer our questions.
      We do research to find out more about our area of interest, in my case the immune regulation in multiple sclerosis. In finding out more, we have more questions and so we perform experiments… and so on and so on….

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I do research by doing experiments too but I usually don’t work in a lab (I used to though). Instead, I do experiments using a computer – I take information about viruses and the DNA sequences of modern mammals and compare them, to find bits of mammal DNA which look like they originated from viruses. This gives me lots of data – I can find 5000 virus-like pieces in one DNA sequence. I then write programs to look through this data and see what the viruses are and what other viruses they are related to.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      The experiments are all part of the research! Experiments are the ‘practical’ part of the research, but research also describes the tons of reading we have to do to find out about the subject we are studying. It really is neverending, because there are always questions to answer!

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