• Question: What's the worst experiment you've done?

    Asked by Jack \(^_^)/ to Greg, Jen, Laura, Mobeen, Paul on 11 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by Jaya, BallerLykAaron, Olivia.
    • Photo: Greg Melia

      Greg Melia answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      The worst experiment I’ve done was one that ran for two weeks solid. The problem was, it needed attending every twelve hours, so I’d always get in at 8am to see to it once, and then I’d go back to work in the evening to see to it again. After two weeks of this, I found that one dodgy connector had ruined my entire experiment, so all the data was useless!

    • Photo: Paul O'Mahoney

      Paul O'Mahoney answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      So I designed an experiment using lasers that would help me sort out different types of particles (this is one of many that i tried). I spent so long aligning the lasers and making sure everything was perfect, and then started the experiment. Unfortunately I needed too much laser power and it overheated the sample and it just didn’t work at all. I was pretty gutted because I spent so much time on it but there are always lessons to learn when things don’t work and ended up writing about it in my PhD thesis anyway, about what went wrong and why, and how it could be avoided. So even though it was probably the worst experiment I’ve done, I still learned a lot from it 🙂

    • Photo: Laura Haworth

      Laura Haworth answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      My worst experiment I did was part of a research project I did whilst at university. I was looking into the meningitis bacteria. It meant a lot of pipetting onto Petri dishes and waiting for things to grow. I would have to wait days to wait and see if anything happened so I could then progress with my experiment but nothing grew 🙁 I did this for weeks and nothing happened. It was extremely frustrating as I just wanted to get results so I could continue with the next steps. We eventually found one of the chemicals I had been using had become contaminated and was stopping the growth. It taught me to stick at things, a find a solution and eventually you will get results.

    • Photo: Jen Lowe

      Jen Lowe answered on 12 Mar 2016:

      I accidentally did an experiment to find out why you have to prick jacket potatoes before they go in the oven…. much oven cleaning.
      I also home dyed my hair a deep red/brown when at college and my previously blond fringe went pink.

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