• Question: whats your lab like?

    Asked by ehodge1 to Claire, Elizabeth, Manolis, Mark, Zach on 13 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Claire Vinten

      Claire Vinten answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I am the odd one out, and I don’t actually work in a lab! I think it is important to understand that scientists can do lots of things, not just experiments in labs! I work with people to do my science, I talk to them to find their opinions on topics that I am interested in. I also use people to find out how something works – something that they experience that I don’t. This gets very close to something called ‘Social Science’ which looks at why people do things.

    • Photo: Mark Wallace

      Mark Wallace answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Check out the pics on my profile page. My lab is a big room that’s divided into smaller spaces with black curtains that can block laser light. In each if these little areas is a special table made of metal, where the surface of the table floats on a layer of air. This helps stop vibrations in my experiments. I then put the lasers, microscopes, mirrors, lenses, and a camera on the table to build my experiment.

    • Photo: Zach Dixon

      Zach Dixon answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I have a couple of pictures of the lab I work in on my profile page 🙂

      I work in a large open plan laboratory with lots of different equipment shared by many groups. It is a relatively new building and I like how spacious it is and how much natural light we get in during the day 🙂

    • Photo: Elizabeth Ratcliffe

      Elizabeth Ratcliffe answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Hi ehodge1,
      my labs are all joined together by a corridor inside, as we have some large robots they need a lab to themselves, we then have labs without robots which we use for cell culture and a large analysis lab. In the analysis lab we have robot microscopes that can take lots of pictures / videos of our cells and analyse them, we also have lots of other kit to analyse the cells by looking at the proteins they have on their surface or their DNA. We need all this help because we do so much analysis, this is how we know we’ve made the right cells and how we can check if the medicinal effects we are trying to make are working. Each lab has a big window to another corridor that visitors can walk along, this means we can have lots of visitors who can see what we do – including visitors who check what we’re doing is safe and proper, but they don’t need to come in the lab. This helps to keep our labs clean which is important for growing cells and making medicines. Next to our normal labs we have a separate set of super clean lab rooms, these are our practise labs for making medicines. When we are working with companies and hospitals that make medicines we need to show we can make the medicine safely (free form bacteria and nasties!) and that it works (lots of analysis). We don’t wear normal lab coats in here, we have lots of bacteria on our skin so we cover up as much as possible and wear a “bunny” suit – check out the pic on my profile page. Its really funny when we have visitors looking through the lab windows at us (the windows are massive – like a glass wall!), I have to fight the urge to start doing “the robot” dance!

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