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Asked by amyduring to Alberto, Chris, Emmanuel on 27 Jun 2013.
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Emmanuel Amabebe answered on 27 Jun 2013:
I do not work with animals at the moment. My work is centered around finding the causes of premature births in pregnant women and devicing ways these factors can be prevented. Its really exciting and fulfilling to help pregnant women and their families find the solutions to their problems. Moreso many homes are saved from the hussle, stress and burden of having a premature baby. I enjoy this a lot.
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Chris Whittle answered on 27 Jun 2013:
I chose to study biology because I found evolution and how life works very fascinating. I think I preferred biology to chemistry and physics because I was so fascinated by DNA and how cells use DNA to make all sorts of things.
I don’t work directly with animals. Saying that, a lot of the research I do is based on what we see in animals.
What I really like about my work as scientist is the chance to discover new things that nobody has ever seen before. We still don’t know a lot about pregnancy and how it works, so there is a gold mine of things to discover!
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Alberto Lapedriza answered on 28 Jun 2013:
When you want to understand how human diseases work and how to cure them, you have two main models where you can do your experiments: cell cultures or animal models; because it is not right to do research in humans. Cell cultures consist in taking the cell type that you are studying, growing them in a Petri dish in the lab, and doing the experiments on the. For example, if you want to study a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, you culture neurons in your plate. The problem of using cell is that they are isolated in a plate, so you cannot study how they really work inside the body.
The other alternative is using animals as models for human diseases. There are many animals used in research: worm, fruit fly, zebrafish, frog, mouse, etc. The advantage of this is that we study how the cells work in the organism, in their natural environment. Thus, the conclusions that we get are much more valuable than with cell cultures (even though the animal may seem very different to humans), because the basic processes in the cells are mostly the same as in humans.
The thing I enjoy the most in my job is talking to other people about science. Talking with other scientists is really useful and inspiring, because you have the opportunity to discuss your research, and ask for advice or tips. Talking with non-scientist is very exciting, because people is generally very interested on your research, and that helps us to feel the impact of our research on society.
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