• Question: What is your favourite Experiment? And why?

    Asked by becky123 to Betul, Bridget, Ceri-Wyn, Laurel, Maria on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Betul Arslan

      Betul Arslan answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      It is hard to pick one. But I like molecular biology experiments (gene cloning stuff) better. Because it is cleaner (you know what I mean if you ever worked in a chemistry lab), doesn’t stink, you get quicker results and the field is freakishly improving that you see a new product everyday that blows your mind! Also, I feel like a magician, you put waterish looking mixtures in a tiny tube, and there, you just mutated a DNA! Very cool to me 🙂

    • Photo: Bridget Waller

      Bridget Waller answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      An excellent question! Some german scientists wanted to know if chimpanzees can understand what other chimpanzees know (a skill we call ‘theory of mind’). They released two chimpanzees into a room where one piece of food was hidden behind a barrier. The junior chimpanzee went straight for the food that only he could see, presumably because he knew that the other animal couldn’t see it. This meant that he could eat the food first! The senior chimpanzee went for the other piece of food first – because he could win a fight for that food, before going to collect the other. This tells us how the chimpanzees can predict what the other one is going to do – very interesting stuff!

    • Photo: Ceri-Wyn Thomas

      Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Hi Becky- my all time favourite is the Miller-Urey experiment. These two guys at the University of Chicago, Miller and Urey (surprise, surprise) wanted to know whether they could artificially create the building blocks of life- proteins that could form DNA- in a lab by replicating conditions that were known to have prevailed on the early planet. So- they bunged some chemicals H20, CH4, H2CO and NH3 (these chemicals were though to be really common at the Earth’s surface about 3-4 billion years ago) into a glass tube and heated some water under it to evaporate it and create water vapour (like our atmosphere) then they subjected this mixture to a series of electrical sparks to simulate lightening.
      After a week of doing this they analysed their solution and found biological compounds and amino acids used to make proteins! This demonstrated that, under the conditions of the early atmosphere on Earth, chemicals could ‘evolve’ into biological compounds thus creating an opportunity for the origins of life. That was in 1952.

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