• Question: What was your greatest obstacle you encountered during your research and how did you overcome ?

    Asked by Hoffsdtater to Alex, Laura, Lesley, Richard, vediacan on 13 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Richard Prince

      Richard Prince answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Hi Hoffsdtater,
      I think it’s really important that people entering science realise that there is a lot of problem solving to do and that you have to repeat things many times before you can get them to work. So, I’m going to give the same answer here that I gave to a question about finding it hard to progress.:
      When I started to learn a technique called patch clamping, I encountered all kinds of frustrations. It involves placing a tiny glass tube up against a cell and measuring electrical currents that pass through the cell membrane. As you can imagine, you have to have very steady hands! The first time I tried it, I got it to work. The second time….. nothing (broke the glass tube and killed the cell), and after that, no success for the next 6 months. So….. 6 months of coming into work, preparing for experiments for half the day and then spending the second half of the day banging my head against the wall. It’s a technique that requires a delicate touch, and watching out for very subtle changes in the shape of the cell as you bring the tube close to it under the microscope. I very nearly gave up but my boss, Steve, was really patient and spent a lot of time with me. Eventually I got it working and got really good at it. I think this shows that you have to have the right people around you when you are starting out in your career if you want to make progress.
      Best wishes
      Richard

    • Photo: Vedia Can

      Vedia Can answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hey Hoffsdtater!

      Cool name! 🙂

      Well, I have been attempting to produce an in vitro osteoarthritic model. To do this I basically need to simulate the chondrocytes (cartilage cells found covering the surface of joints), with a stimulus, and run cell viability assay experiments to determine the level of cell death. The problem was that this stimulus has been found to also have protective effects at low concentrations but also at high concentrations too!! So, to determine the correct concentration for me to stimulate my cells with to ensure they resemble an osteoarthritic environment, I stimulated the cells with a very wide range of concentrations over a extensive time course, and also ran 3 different cell viability techniques. The results were all over the place, so, I repeated my experiments 5 times on different days (sometimes a different day also has an impact on your results) and on different hours of the day, even used different incubators! I didn’t give up because my goal is to find the cure for Osteoarthritis (so it kept me going). It took me 4 months but I finally found the correct concentration to work with 🙂

      Best Wishes,

      Vedia

    • Photo: Laura Newton

      Laura Newton answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      Hey Hoffsdtater,

      I did a biochemistry degree, specialising more in the biomedicine side of it. I worked for a couple of years doing research into health related things and working with cells. Then as soon as I started my PhD I was put in a chemistry lab and told to make something very complicated. I had literally no idea what I was doing, trying to copy methods from papers that I didn’t understand for at least 3 months which was quite depressing but eventually I managed to persuade my supervisor (who thought I was some kind of genius at everything because I went to Oxford for my undergrad) that I needed more help than I was getting. She also thought that the person who was meant to be helping me was doing more than he actually was. Then I got to meet someone really helpful and friendly and he helped me to make what I was supposed to be making.
      So the moral of the story is don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it or don’t understand something!

      Best wishes,
      Laura

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