Question: How long would it take you to do an experiment ?

Sive Finlay answered on 10 Nov 2013:

Hi Jessica,

That’s a really tricky one because it completely depends on what type of experiment I’m doing. For people who work in labs, a single experiment could take anything from a few hours (for example if you want to make a particular compound) to months or even years for large-scale experiments like clinical trials of new drugs.
My work is a bit different in that I don’t work in labs (no white coats for me!) and my “experiments” are more like long term projects and they usually involve coming up with a new question, collecting data, statistical analyses of the data and then interpreting the results while referring to already published work.
As an example, at the moment I’m working on a project to measure the physical similarities among tenrecs and other species of small mammals. This involved traveling to museums to measure and photograph skulls (9 weeks), and then analysing my measurements and photographs using specific stats techniques to answer my question (probably 2-3 months). Then the experiment or project isn’t really finished until you produce a scientific paper to publish your results and I probably won’t have that finished for another year…
So, for me, an experiment or project takes a long time but it’s hard to put an exact start and end date onto it!
Sive