• Question: do you enjoy your job, whats your favourite part about it? Also do you find something new everyday, and if so does it already have a name or do you make up the name? Futhermore has it already been discovered and have you ever found something very rare and which has never been found before.

    Asked by to Heather, Ditte on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Heather Ritchie

      Heather Ritchie answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I absolutely love my job! Of course there are good days and not-so-good days, and when experiments don’t work it can be very frustrating and upsetting but it just makes the success all the more sweet when you finally figure it all out!

      I would have to say that probably fieldwork is my favourite part of the job. Last year I spent nearly 3 months at sea or in New Zealand which was very cool. Because we are working in the deep-sea most of what is down there is still totally unknown so we often discover new species which is incredibly exciting. How many people can say they were at the discovery of a new species? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16834913, http://www.3news.co.nz/New-species-of-fish-discovered-near-Kermadec-Islands/tabid/1160/articleID/285565/Default.aspx)

      For us, if we discover a species which we beleive to be new to science then we have to put it to a taxonomist who is an expert at identifying species. If the taxonomist declares the species to be new then they have to draw pictures of it and write a detailed description of it. Typically taxonomists are the people who give new species their names. Taxonomists will also often name them after who discovered them. My supervisor has an amphipod named after him (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-12633673).

    • Photo: Ditte Hedegaard

      Ditte Hedegaard answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Hi,

      Yes, I do enjoy my work, but I have to admit that I have days just like the ones Heather describes; where the experiments just do not work and I don’t understand why. That is the thing about working with living material like cells, it can be really difficult to predict how they will react in an experiment. On those days I’ll try to have a day away from the lab and just do something else. I’ll either read some scientific papers, go to seminars, plan my next experiment or talk science with my colleagues.
      Unfortunately, I have not found any new proteins or genes that I could name in the 5 years that I’ve worked as a scientist. However, I’ve discovered that the hepatitis C virus infects the whole liver and not just parts of it, which I think is a pretty cool discovery. This discovery means that the doctors now have to make sure that the medication against hepatitis C virus goes to every part of the liver and not just small sections of it, so that the patient can be cured.

      I would love to discover a new virus, but I’m not sure it would be named after me. It is more likely that it would be named after the disease it causes (like HIV, which stands for human immunodeficiency virus) or the organ it infects (like hepatitis C virus, which means the virus that infects the liver).

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