• Question: What was your first job when you used your scientific skills ?

    Asked by starlites123 to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 15 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 15 Jun 2012:

      When I was a student at Bristol University, I had a job in the summer at a company in Coventry, called Courtaulds, who make fabrics. They had developed a new medical dressing for open wounds made with a type of sea weed. They had some evidence that the dressing actually helped healing and wanted to see if there were any special proteins in it (or in the sea weed it was made from) that might be responsible for the improved healing they saw.

      I tried all sorts of different ways to get proteins out of the sea weed powder that they used to make the dressing and tried to separate them out into single proteins by using an electric current to ‘pull’ the proteins through a gel (smaller proteins move faster).

      I was only there for 6 weeks, so I didn’t crack the problem. Because it was a company I was working for , and they tend to be a bit secretive, I never found out what happened in the end! 🙁

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      My phd made me really start to use my skills. It was all about experimental design and making sure what I was doing was correct.

      Working with genes and DNA you can’t actually see them! So you have to rely on your scientific skills to interpret the results. It’s not like being a baker and you get to see the loaf at the end….

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