• Question: have any of your experments gone wrong

    Asked by anon-40230 on 15 Nov 2022. This question was also asked by anon-41315.
    • Photo: Vincent Monchal

      Vincent Monchal answered on 15 Nov 2022:

      Yes, there is always things that can go wrong like in general in life. For example, I spend 5 days travelling to Walles going across all the coast, crossing the road of soldiers because they were training at the site I wanted to go. All of that for nothing because at the end I analyse the samples collected there and it turns out that they were all unusable.

    • Photo: Vanessa Rodrigues

      Vanessa Rodrigues answered on 15 Nov 2022:

      It always feels like it is all going terribly wrong until it goes right. These are most of my projects.
      But there was that one…
      I had to make a pattern with a laser on a new hygroscopic (water-absorbing) material. It needed a special environment for storage and to be handled. I did the best I could and ran the experiment for almost 48 hours controlling the exposure. Eventually, it still managed to turn cloudy from absorbing moisture and the whole pattern was ruined.

    • Photo: Ingmar Schoen

      Ingmar Schoen answered on 16 Nov 2022:

      There are experiments where I have made mistakes when setting them up. This happens only from time to time, and normally mainly when the methods are new.
      One thing that was hard for me was to understand that experiments that use cells are not as reproducible as a physics experiment. There are many factors that can influence the behaviour of cells, and if an experiment does not work or gives really suspicious results, it is important to repeat it. This also means that we have to repeat experiments with cells several times to be confident about the results.

    • Photo: Anna Desmond

      Anna Desmond answered on 16 Nov 2022:

      Yes, I have made several mistakes when setting up an experiment and sometimes my controls which are samples used to compare your test samples have been contaminated with bacteria or they don’t work. But this happens only from time to time.

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