Question: What is one of the most difficult challenges you have had to overcome in your research?
Comments
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My biggest challenge was getting people to believe my best bit of research. Our team discovered the earliest evidence of live birth in a vertebrate at 380 million years. nobody thought that primitive fish were capable of giving birth to live young so first we had to prove that it was an embryo inside the mother and not the last meal. We were lucky that we also had the umbilical cord present – but this proved to be another sticking point. Nobody believed that a soft tissue structure would be present in a fossil that old. We really had to do lots of research and provide lots of proof until we were finally believed. It can be frustrating knowing you’ve discovered something great and people keep telling you it is not possible. It was fantastic thought we were able to present the results of all of our research which showed we were right and that it was an embryo.
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I agree with Chris, the biggest difficulty/challenge really is funding, it makes science harder than it needs to be. This is why this program is great, its a way to get money to tell people about the thing we love to do. Public outreach and education is the worst funded area of science.
Oh dear. There are so many. 😉 I don’t think this is what you meant, but probably the biggest challenge I have faced is a lack of funding. I was lucky enough to work at NCI, which is a USA federal government institute, and the money there was… not infinite, but there was enough to do basically whatever experiment I wanted to do without having to think about it. When I moved back to Australia, the adjustment was really difficult – I had to start prioritising, and applying for funding before doing experiments. It was a big challenge, and it is ongoing. Science funding in Australia is not great, and you have to fight for everything you get.
But because that’s not what I think you meant, I will give you an experimental example of a challenge. I had an experiment where I had to prove that a bunch of specific genes were expressed (turned on) at a higher level in cancers than in normal tissue. I do that a lot (using two techniques, PCR and Northern blot), and I was going along happily, until I got to a type of gene that I hadn’t worked on before. These were microRNAs – they’ve only been discovered within the last twenty years, and characterised within the last ten. At the time, I had never done any work with them. The challenge was that they are really really short – that’s why they are called microRNAs. They are too short to do PCR on, and so I tried Northern blots, but that didn’t work either. I eventually worked out that this was because: 1) the way I purified the RNA was DESTROYING the microRNAs before I ever got to analyse them, so I had to change my purification technique, and 2) the Northern blot technique didn’t work for such short pieces of RNA because the chemicals were too harsh, so I had to revamp, through a lot of trial and error, my Northern blot technique. Eventually (about three months later), I got a really nice result, and it made it into a paper which I published about five years ago. So it was worth it. 🙂
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