Question: What are your hopes for your studies

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  1. The thing I’d like to do in the next few years is this: I want to change the way science is done to make it faster.

    Normally scientists work in secret. They try to achieve a certain thing before someone else. If someone is the first to do something, they often become famous for being the first person. History is full of stories of people racing to be first to discover something.

    Now what matters, really, is the science, not the person who discovered it. If Newton had not seen a rainbow coming out of a prism, someone else would. The important thing is that we understand things, not who did it.

    But if you work in secret, you keep stuff secret, and that slows down other people working on the same thing. If you share everything then maybe you discover something at the same time as a bunch of other people, but you get there faster. I just want to understand things as fast as I can – I’m kind of impatient.

    So what I want to do is show that we can solve problems faster if we work together, and share everything. This is kind of obvious, but for various really boring reasons a lot of science is not done like this. People try to beat other people, so don’t share. Scientists sometimes won’t, for example, talk about experiments that gave bad results, because that looks bad for them. Sometimes we only tell people about the good results, because we want to impress people. But you know what? In science you need to know what doesn’t work AND what does work.

    Sharing of everything, where everyone can take part, is called “open source” in computer software. Lots of really impressive things are open source – things like Wikipedia, and the web browsers you might be using right now (Firefox? Chrome?). These things have been created by a lot of people all working together.

    I’d like to show we can do that in science. Actually, we have just shown it – the drug we’re working on – we discovered a new way to make it because we uploaded everything to the internet and allowed everyone to see what we were doing. A few companies around the world helped us out, and we solved a problem faster than if we’d just been working on our own.

    So what’s the plan? Now we want to show that we can find a NEW DRUG using this open source idea. So everyone works together on the internet, and does experiments in their labs, and shares everything. We think this will make the research faster, and we think it’ll make the drugs cheaper. We’re about to start this project and are very excited. The drug would be for malaria, which is a very nasty disease that kills about a million people a year, mainly kids under 5.

    If we can do that, then maybe we’ll change the way science is done. Actually, you know what? I think this WAS how science was done when it was “invented” but in the last hundred years or so we kind of forgot that. Also, the internet is a truly amazing thing, and we’re not using it properly to work together to solve tough problems.

    So my hopes are that doing science together on the web will make science go faster. And we’re starting with drug discovery.

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  2. My hopes for my research project is that I hope I can show scientists a way of talking about their work to lots of people easier and that it’s not as scary as it sounds.

    A lot of scientists are actually worried about answering questions on science or even talking about their work because they’re worried about saying something wrong so they usually stay away from this unless they really have to say something. I constantly worry in “I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here!” about what I say in case I get it wrong.

    Compared to that there are three words that scientists dread to say when answering a question and that is, “I don’t know.” Even I’m a little worried about saying that in public because it means that I’m not as smart as everyone thinks I’m supposed to be. And worse still, what if it is something really easy and I don’t know. I’ll just look silly forever.

    But really, those three words are the bravest words anyone, (scientist, teacher, doctor….anyone), can say because it is admitting that you don’t know everything about everything. In doing my research into this, I have learned to say “I don’t know.” and not worry about it, (most of the time). I am hoping by the time I get to the end of my project, I will be able to show other scientists that it’s okay as well and hopefully more scientists will talk about their work to people who don’t work in science.

    You always hear about what a policeman or doctor does but you never get to hear about what a scientist is working on.

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  3. By the end of the year (well actually, by the end of September) I would like to have shown which part of the cell my protein is in, and whether or not blocking the protein will stop the cell from doing what it is supposed to do. These are the aims of my Honours project. By September I have to be finished all my Lab work so I can start writing up my many-thousand word thesis.
    Longer term, I hope that what I find is interesting and that it will help other scientists to understand this part of the immune system so that they can help people whose immune system isn’t working properly.

    I hope that next year I will be selected for a Science Communication course at ANU (they only take about 15 people each year), and that after that I can actually get a job and start being paid, while teaching people about science.

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  4. I am employed as a a full-time scientist in a university. The only formal study or training I am doing is part-time and in my role as a Scout Leader – in Adult Support and in Front Line Management. This takes a few weekends each year and will get me TAFE certificates and diplomas. They are nice to have but since I already have 4 university qualifications, they are just hobby.

    As part of our employment, all scientists are expected to participate in informal study and professional development. Things like reading journals about the latest scientific discoveries, and attending conferences, where scientists talk about their work, including work-in-progress.

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  5. I study lizards and I want to find out why some lizards lay eggs while others give birth to live young. As part of my work, I study the DNA of lizards to look for genes that might make lizards switch from laying eggs to giving birth.

    At the moment, studying the DNA of lizards and other reptiles is really difficult. All of the DNA (called a genome) in humans is decoded. The whole DNA genome is also decoded for lots of different animals too, including heaps of different fishes, frogs, birds and mammals. But there are very few reptiles that have decoded DNA, and only one lizard. This means there is so much about how lizards’ bodies work that we just don’t know.

    I hope that in the very near future, scientists work hard to decode the DNA of more lizards. So far, I have found a cancer protein in a lizard’s uterus. This doesn’t mean the lizard had cancer – it means that cancer may have evolved at the same time as live birth evolved in lizards and mammals (including humans). This is really cool evolution, but we wouldn’t find out these sorts of things without looking at the DNA of reptiles and other animals. So I hope that the DNA of more lizards gets decoded.

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