• Question: have you ever discovered something unusual

    Asked by Jess to Amy, Craig, Laura, Partha, Saffron on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Amy Cameron

      Amy Cameron answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      I’m not sure about unusual. I have discovered things which may conflict with either my own or others findings. This means I have to go back to the literature (other people’s published papers) and see if anyone else has found the same or something similar to explain my result. I check my results by doing repeats of the same experiment and check that I have not made any mistakes in my experiment too. I hope that this answers your question.

    • Photo: Laura Wales

      Laura Wales answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I wouldn’t say I’ve discovered anything unusual but I did find something unexpected. It was when I did research to see the hepatitis E virus prevalence in Scottish blood donors.

      I expected to find some samples with antibodies to Hep E in them. This just showed that the donor had been previously exposed to the virus but got better. What I didn’t expect to find was active virus in the samples because if the donor wasn’t feeling well, they wouldn’t go to donate. However, there were samples with active virus in them.

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