• Question: what do you work with doing you job .

    Asked by gracebasham to Callum, Gina, Katie, Michelle, Sam on 15 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by leeboii.
    • Photo: Callum Johnston

      Callum Johnston answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Hi Grace,
      For my job I work with brain cells that I grow in a dish! When I say I grow them there are a couple of ways I can do it. Some cells I use are cancer brain cells, so they keep dividing and fill up the dish every few days, then you take some out, about 5,000 cells and let them divide again. 5,000 turn into 10,000 then into 20,000 until the dish is full again. The other way is to take the brain cells from a baby mouse. These cells don’t divide so you have to put all the cells you need into the dish at the start, but they still grow. To start with they look like little circles but they soon grown long spindly arms like the one you can see on the Cells Zone home page.

    • Photo: Michelle Linterman

      Michelle Linterman answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Hi Grace,

      I work with white blood cells, the cells of your immune system.

      The main type of experiment is looking at what types of white blood cells are doing during an immunisation or infection. To do this we mix the cells with different florescent tags that can attach to parts of the cell. We then put the cells in a big machine with 5 different lasers to excite the florescent tags and get them to send out different colours of light. This can tell us what type of white blood cell the are, and if they are in an infection fighting mood

    • Photo: Katie Howe

      Katie Howe answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      I work with egg cells. Because a lot of people have ethical problems with using human eggs cells for research we use egg cells from mice as they are very similar to human eggs (because we are both mammals). Everyone has to do a training course though to make sure the mice suffer as little as possible.

      I grow these eggs in an incubator which is set at 37oC (body temperature) to keep the eggs warm and happy! I also spend a lot of time looking down different microscopes in my job. I really like doing this as cells look so cool when you can see them more closely!

    • Photo: Gina Tse

      Gina Tse answered on 15 Nov 2012:

      Hi Grace,

      In my job I work with cancer cells, I am looking into why cancer spreads and causes a lot of problems for patients as well as doctors and scientists.
      But when I’m not in my lab I also do a lot of demonstrating and tutoring other students. So being a scientist doesn’t just mean you are locked away in your lab forever more, in fact in can be the completely opposite! I tutor students at my university as well as go to schools like yours to talk about science and why it’s such a good thing to go into!

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