• Question: Has any of your projects gone wrong

    Asked by Adeoluwa to Samet, DrLukeF, Hannah, Alison, Alice on 26 Mar 2025.
    • Photo: Hannah Blyth

      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 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: Charlotte

    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.