• Question: What is your favourite type of experiment and why?

    Asked by jessstphils to Vera, Katie on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Any type of experiment! It’s always exciting to analyse something to find out if what you thought would happen has happened. Sometime science suproses you by not acting the way you thought it would.

      I prefer experiments using chemistry – known as wet chemistry or synthetic chemistry more than the analysis that uses machines.

    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      I don’t experiment as such, but my favourite type of experiment that my colleagues do is that of working out how the body grows. For example, you can put a fluorescent dye into particular cells of really early embryos (only a few hundred cells) of, for example, tadpoles. The embryo doesn’t get hurt and when the labelled cells divide, they keep some dye. This means you can watch the labelled cells divide and distribute themselves across the body as the embryo grows. This way you can find out which cells of the early embryo are responsible for ultimately turning into bone, skin, heart, brain and so forth.

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