• Question: What is the most intresting scientific discovery for you that was ever discovered?

    Asked by esmaalovee to Laura, Lily, Mark, Paul, Sarah on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Great question! I’m going to choose something that has happened recently.

      A new area of science called synthetic biology looks to make new organisms from scratch. Why? Well scientists believe not only will this help them better understand biology but also because they can design these new organisms to perform important jobs for us: like produce clean energy or clean up pollution – things that will help the environment and humanity.

      So far no synthetic organisms have been created. But recently a scientist called J Craig Venter announced he had made a significant breakthrough by making the first synthetic genome that is able to “boot up” a cell.

      I believe this could really kick start a new age of science which could have implications for use in all areas of life.

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      The most interesting – well there are two answers to this.

      Firslty the microscope and the 1st images people had of the microscopic world always amaze me – if you look at the books that they produced (no cameras for them in those days) where they drew pictures of what they could see down the microscope then they are really amazing – it really opened our eyes up to a new world

      Second it would have to be the Sanger sequencing method – this is a method that allows you to easily sequence DNA and allowed us to sequence the human genome project which is a major achievement of science and is leading to a much better understanding of how we work

    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Einstein’s thoery of general relativity.

      He worked out that gravity is to do with the way massive objects cause the space around them to curve. It was an amazing idea and one that has, so far, stood the test of time in every experiment that has tried to prove it wrong.

    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      My personal favorite scientific discovery was done by Dave Bartel who works at MIT. He studies a molecule called Ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is a polymer, a long chain of sugar molecules linked together in a special way. Like DNA it is a way of moving information within the cell.

      As a graduate student, Dave Bartel took random sequences of RNA and found one that could replicate, it could make a new piece of RNA from just the sugar pieces. This is the basic requirement for the origin of life, the ability to make a precise copy of information from a template.

      I don’t know if that’s clear, but you can read more about it here: http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/bartel_bio.html

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      So many things could fit into this category! If I just look at my own area of astronomy, then I guess it could be something like the (accidental!) discovery of what we call the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is the “glow” left behind by the Big Bang, that created the universe about 14 billion years ago.

      The discovery of the microwave glow across the whole sky led to our current belief in the Big Bang theory, so it helped us to explain the creation of the whole Universe, and observations of it now are helping to give us clues about where stars, galaxies etc. came from.

      So this is a pretty huge discovery, and has helped us to understand where the entire Universe came from – and maybe where it is going in the future as well.

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