• Question: Do you have to work with a lot of blood in your job?

    Asked by sophieearbuthnott to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 15 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 15 Jun 2012:

      No, I don’t work with blood at all. I work with human cell lines taken from skin and from brain tumors. Sometimes with mouse embryonic stem cell lines as well.

      The blood cells on my profile page are, literally, my blood! I promised to count the cells in a drop of blood during a live chat and I’m a woman of my word: it would have been mean to jab a needle into anyone else’s thumb!

    • Photo: Anouk Gouvras

      Anouk Gouvras answered on 15 Jun 2012:

      No I don’t work with blood either. I work with urine and stool samples. The eggs of the parasite I study come out in the urine and stool of infected people. I collect these, filter out the eggs, make them hatch into the larval worms then I collect these larval worms and store them onto special paper. This paper has chemicals on it that lyse open the cells of the larvae and immobilizes the parasite DNA. I then just carry the cards with the parasite DNA back the the museum for lab analyses.

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 19 Jun 2012:

      Yes- loads of it.we get around 5-10ml per patientnd 5000 patients a year- so if you were a vampire youd be very happy

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