I used to be a teacher and I taught chemistry and physics up to GCSE level, and I studied chemistry at A-level. Some of the work I do involves a bit of chemistry, such as how chemicals interact within cells and with the materials that I use in certain experiments. For instance, I use a number of chemical reactions to look at cells and the DNA or chemicals they contain, and I need to know how these work in case they go wrong.
Nowadays, science is very interdisciplinary, and problems cannot be solved by looking at them from a single perspective. Therefore, it is very common in science that biologists interact with mathematicians, chemists or computer scientists to find the answer to a question that biologists couldn’t answer alone.
In addition, when I was studying my undergraduate degree I had to study maths, physics, chemistry, and computer science. It was quite a long time ago, but I can still remember the main things and it is helping me in my research in biology.
It’s not usually common for scientists to switch between subjects once they begin a research career as it takes a long time to become an expert in one particular area and everyone has their own favorite subjects. But often the subjects overlap and use the same tools, for example I use chemical reactions to make lots of copies of the DNA in my insects to identify different genes that I’m interested in. Science is becoming a lot more interactive as questions become more difficult to answer and so scientists who study different subjects are starting to work together more often to share their special knowledge.
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