• Question: there are lots of other fields you can research in biology, why did you pick the one you're researching?

    Asked by mehaaar to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 19 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by rebekahmay, lilbowen.
    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      My field is called bioinformatics and involves using computers to answer questions about biology. I chose this field because it is very important at the moment. There is lots of new technology which allows us to sequence the DNA of different species, and this produces a huge amount of raw data. This data contains lots of information which could teach us about biology, evolution and disease. It’s important to have people who can understand this data and turn it in to something meaningful, or all this information will be lost.

    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      There’s a balance.
      I have things that interest me.
      The government sets a list of questions they think science should be pursuing.
      The art is to find a way to mesh the two so that you get funding to do these things!

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I picked tumour immunology because it fires up my imagination 🙂 If you think of diseases as bad guys, then you can think of our immune system as the good guys, protecting us from harm. Cancer is a special kind of villain, because it doesn’t attack us from the outside like bacteria and viruses – it comes from inside our own bodies. You might think, oh dear, the immune system can’t handle that! And you would be half-right, because a lot of the time cancer cells escape immune control, and that’s why tumours can grow.

      But wait! Scientists have discovered that the immune system CAN actually recognise and get rid of cancer cells – but cancer cells also have sneaky strategies to hide from the immune system, and trick them into thinking that the cancer isn’t there! There is a power struggle there, and the good guys are losing. So the field of tumour immunology is concerned with trying to find out what exactly these powers are – what weapons the immune system has, and what defenses the tumours use – and inventing ways to give the immune system a boost so that they come out on top.

      I think that’s a really amazing story, and it makes me really excited to think that I can be part of this story too. That’s why I chose the project I’m working on!

      (PS: Mind you, immune cells aren’t always the good guys! In other kinds of disease they can be bad guys too, for example in autoimmunity. But Ruth can probably tell you more about that.)

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      There are so many things you can research!! In my first year of my PhD, I did 3 different project all in medical science and all relating to disease (wounding healing, osteoarthritis and multiple sclerosis) and even though I’m still studying multiple sclerosis for 3 years I’m now looking at a different aspect of it. In research you can have a project that is all about one molecule!

      I chose multiple sclerosis because I find the immune system amazing!! I look at how to make the body tolerant to myelin which is attacked. So it’s really cool that you can see what’s going on inside the body and how the different cells in the immune system are interacting with each other.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I picked it because I was already working in microbiology, as a technician, and had a chance to go further and become a full time researcher in what I already thought was a really interesting area.

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