• Question: What has been your most groundbreaking discovery?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      This is a very difficult question to answer. It takes many years for a discovery to be identified as groundbreaking. Take most of the Noble prize winners, the value of what they did was only appreciated much later on. Also, it is very difficult to make groundbreaking discovery alone. A lot of the work scientists do are in collaboration with many other scientists.

      So i am afraid it is a bit of a disheartening answer. However, there are little things we discover that no one knew before, such as new variants of HPV virus in people in Scotland which we found in my group, that add on to becoming big groundbreaking discovery.

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      My greatest result to date occurred during my PhD. I was investigating an enzyme that no one else had studied in detail. I found out many new and exciting things about this enzyme. The most important was that I showed the enzyme could make a product from a substrate that I gave to it. This was a massive result as proteins and enzymes are very complicated things and to find a chemical that interacted with my enzyme was a great achievement.

    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      I don’t think anything I have discovered is groundbreaking. A lot of the time science is about making small discoveries that add up to a bigger picture.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I’m with Ramya and Hannah on this – I don’t consider my results particularly ‘groundbreaking’, but more as a part of a much bigger whole. However, I think this can partly be due to us as scientists (and anyone doing research in general – scientific or not) being so closely involved in our own work, and sometimes forgetting to take step back. I’ve had quite a few times where I’ve worked so intensively on a project so the results just become ‘normal’ to me – but when I’ve presented them to others, they’ve replied ‘wow…we really needed to know this, and now we’ve got an answer’. It’s an awesome feeling hearing that after all the hard work!

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