• Question: what experiments do you make and design?

    Asked by sciencechick to Dalya, Tim, Tom on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by maisha07, geewhizz97.
    • Photo: Dalya Soond

      Dalya Soond answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      I spend a lot of my time lately teaching and writing grants. But mainly I do experiments.

      What is an experiment really? You come up with a hypothesis, figure out the best way to test it, and then see if you are right or wrong when you look at the results.

      So I might have the hypothesis: p110delta is involved in protection against cancer.
      To test this, we will cut p110delta out of the DNA of some mice (p110delta knockout). I will then inject a little bit of a tumour in these mice or wild-type ones with normal p110delta.
      If the tumour grows in the same way as the wild-type, I will say that I was wrong and p110delta doesn’t do anything to cancer.
      If the tumour grows faster in the p110delta knockouts than in the wild-types, I can tell that p110delta normally is used to stop cancer from growing (because without it the tumours grow faster.)
      If the tumours grow slower in the knockouts than the wild-types, I can tell that p110delta normally helps the tumour grow.

      After I get either of these last 2 results, I would then come up with another hypothesis to try to figure out which cells p110delta works in and what molecules these cells use when responding to cancer. i might also test if drugs against p110delta will change the way cancer grows in mice so we can predict how they might affect cancer growth in humans.

    • Photo: Tim Millar

      Tim Millar answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      All my experiments are designed by me. Sometimes we look to see what other people have done and try to replicate or improve on their experiments. There are a lot of ideas that other people have which they publish for others to read. By mixing my ideas and what has gone before, we manage to design tests to see if our ideas really are true, and sometimes they are!

    • Photo: Tom Crick

      Tom Crick answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      Most of my experiments are solving complex computational problems on large computer systems, often using hundreds or thousands of processors/computers. I design these experiments/tests and they are usually to solve a specific problem e.g. to show the speed of a specific solver tool or whether a problem is tractable (can be solved in a reasonable time).

      Sometimes they can take days or weeks to solve…

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