• Question: what made you choose the specific study of DNA over other areas of science?

    Asked by missingunicorn to Jane, Anna, Nick on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hi @missingunicorn DNA and genes have always been really interesting to me – they are the seeds of life! Just about everything in us is controlled to some degree by our genes. The age you developed your first tooth as a baby was predicted by your genes. Whether people are likely to get cancer in the future – there will be messages in their genes about this. That’s amazing to me.

    • Photo: Nick Goldman

      Nick Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I think I got interested because the idea of DNA is so simple — your whole genome can be described by a molecule which is just a long string of 4 different types of smaller molecule. That means it’s really easy to describe using mathematics, which is what I’m best at. But it’s so hard to *understand* the genome, and the way it makes our bodies work (and go wrong), so there’s always a puzzling new problem to work on.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      I actually wanted to be a vet when I was at school, but I changed my mind when I learned about how scientists including Watson and Crick cracked the genetic code and worked out what individual genes in bacteria and fungi were doing.

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