• Question: How long does it take to conduct an experiment and get all the research?

    Asked by ellie789 to Daniel, Jon, Louise, Sharon, Zoe on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      It depends on the type of experiments, some are short and some take longer.
      The experiment I am doing today for example, will take me about 8 hours. I am looking to see if there is a certain protein in my cells and I am using a technique called and ELISA. if it works, the liquid on my cells will change colour and I can measure the amount of protien there. I will need to repeat this experiment a few times to make sure the result is correct, but it’s not very long.

      If I am a making stem cells, it takes me 6 days to get my egg to the right stage, and this is the part that is the trickiest, as lots of things can go wrong, after that, then i have to leave the cells in the incubator for about a week, which is hard as I am impatient and like to know if things have worked, but they prefer being left alone!! If it has worked then it’s about another month, of looking after the cells every day, to make sure they are the right thing, and then I can pass them on to someone else, so it’s a long process!

    • Photo: Louise Dash

      Louise Dash answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      It depends! Some experiments can last for years, others only take a few minutes. There’s an experiment in Australia to see how long it takes for a droplet of pitch (a kind of tar) to form that’s been running since 1927!

      I don’t do experiments in a lab, but do calculations on a computer that are like “virtual” experiments using code that I’ve written. So far the longest of those has taken over a month to finish calculating! I was worried we might get a power cut before it was finished but fortunately it didn’t, and the results from it are quite interesting, we’re still analysing them at the moment.

    • Photo: Jon Copley

      Jon Copley answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      It can take years. In my work, planning an expedition to visit a part of the deep ocean where no-one has gone before takes two to three years. We have to make sure we have all the equipment we want to use, and get the ship that we need (which we share with other scientists, so we usually have to wait until it is available).

      The experiments that we do can last years too. For example, earlier this year I left some whalebones and wood at the bottom of an ocean trench, where they will stay until 2012 to see what creatures colonise them.

    • Photo: Daniel Richardson

      Daniel Richardson answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I think that the shortest I have ever done it is in about two weeks. That’s because the raw material for our science – our subjects – are students with nothing better to do. So it’s quite easy to make up an experiment, program it, and persuade them to take part in it. The longest… well I am currently still writing up work that I started about 8 years ago. I still haven’t quite got it right….

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