• Question: What is the most exiting discovery you have ever discovered

    Asked by anon-193092 to Carl, Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Emma on 2 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-193418.
    • Photo: Carl Heron

      Carl Heron answered on 2 Nov 2018: last edited 2 Nov 2018 6:10 pm

      I found out what hunter-gatherers used as ‘chewing gum’ 10,000 years ago. Can you guess what it is? The stuff we analysed had tooth impressions to prove that it had been chewed in the past. We think they chewed this substance for a number of reasons.

    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      As part of my placement year I was working on a study for a new pain medication. I was responsible for running the weekly safety graphs to check how the drug was working in patients. I discovered it was having a significant effect on one of the patients laboratory values and this lead to me doing research and giving a presentation to the rest of a study team about how this drug could be used to treat a new indication. We started planning a new clinical trial to test this medicine in different type of patients because of my research which was pretty exciting considering I was still only a student at the time!

    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      Oo difficult question! During my undergraduate degree I worked in a team that discovered that human brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease have more of a protein called amyloid-beta in, than humans that don’t have Alzheimer’s disease. The exciting thing for us was that we used real human brain samples from people that had donated their bodies to science after they’d died, and that the amount of protein matched to the stage of the disease – so more amyloid-beta protein in the brain, means more advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We published our work in a scientific journal, that was my first publication 🙂

    • Photo: Iain Staniland

      Iain Staniland answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      My favourite discovery is the work I did looking at the difference beween Male and female fur seals. Male fur seals are much harder to study as they are much bigger and more aggressive than the females. Nobody knew what males did when they were at sea, I led a team of people that managed to put miniature loggers on several males that were breeding on South Georgia, without getting bitten! One of the things I discovered is that they were able to dive much deeper than females, reaching the seabed to feed at a depth of 350 m which is deeper than the height of the Eiffel tower! (even SCUBA divers struggle to reach 50 m)

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