• Question: have you ever experimented on living things? e.g animals,humans...

    Asked by charmiluv1d to Lilly, Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Nick on 7 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by simone2001.
    • Photo: Deepak Kar

      Deepak Kar answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Thankfully I am doing particle physics, which involves only computers! I was mortally afraid of dissecting frogs in my high school anyway!

      However, at CERN in Geneva, our experiment consists of about 3000 people from different countries working together. It is remarkable that we get any work done, since each scientist has his/her own opinion on how to do things. In that sense, it can also be thought of as a sociological experiment with scientists!

    • Photo: Lilian Hunt

      Lilian Hunt answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      I have used living animals before for research. I mostly work with Zebrafish which are used to study embryo development – going from a single fertilised egg cell into a fully formed fish. I’ve never done any work on a Zebrafish that is older than 48 hours from the point where the egg is fertilised. The fish are so small at that point that you have to look at them under a microscope but they are just about able to move their tails. They also don’t really look like fish at this stage but develop with see-through bodies so you can see how they go from just one cell into a fish with a heart, liver, eye, brain and everything! The most I do is inject a gene from jellyfish and a piece of DNA I’m interested in into the 1 cell fertilised egg and then it glows green in the Zebrafish as it grows depending on where that bit of DNA is most important.

      The main reason anyone would really use humans is for drug development and even then most of the time people volunteer for the very last stage of testing before the drugs are made for public use. Therefore we don’t really say ‘human experimentation’ or ‘experimenting on humans’ as we mostly use people to test how much of the drug is best.

    • Photo: Alan Fitzsimmons

      Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Nope, only when I make a new curry recipe and ask people to try it! As an astronomer I only need to use machinery and computers, not animals or people.

      But I think it is good that other scientists like Lilian do this. Without experimenting on living things we wouldn’t understand much of life on Earth, or have many of the life saving medicines that we have today.

    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 9 Mar 2014:

      My work involves very, very small particles rather than living things. We once dissected a pig’s heart at school though, which was pretty cool!

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      No, in astronomy all of our experiments are done with telescopes and computers. I did once cook a very unpleasant meal for a colleague once, I think that counted as an experiment on a human, and he didn’t like it!

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