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Asked by Adeoluwa to Samet, DrLukeF, Hannah, Alison, Alice on 26 Mar 2025.
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Hannah Blyth answered on 26 Mar 2025:
Absolutely! When I was a PhD student I was working with a version of my fungus that needed a little extra support to grow (a specific nutrient in its growing media) so that I could give it a copy of a gene it needed to survive without that support. I either wasn’t really thinking or thought it would instantly take up the gene and be okay, fortunately my boss was clever and helped me work it out 🙂
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Alison Tidy answered on 7 Apr 2025:
Yes in science things can often go wrong, sometimes this is because of silly mistakes, and other times completely out of your control. I once had some baby bunnies manage to get into our rabbit proofed polytunnel (think large glasshouse covered in plastic) and they went around and ate all of the flowers off my plants – which was the only part of the plant I was studying as part of my project. New rabbit proofing needed to go down and because our plants take so long to grow we had to wait a full year before I could repeat the project
Comments
Charlotte commented on :
Projects go wrong a lot of don’t give us the answers we expect. This is seen as a bad thing at the time but sometimes it can be good. If I thought a combination of drug A and B would be good to treat my dish of cells and they weren’t that means we can stop researching A and B together and use our time and money to look at a different set of drugs. It also might have revealed something we didn’t know. maybe when A and B are used together it revealed that something else was being effected be A which we hadn’t even realised and that opens up another area of research for us.