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Asked by lolly107 to Emma, James, Jayne, Kara, Sharon on 18 Mar 2011 in Categories: Stem Cells.
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Sharon Sneddon answered on 11 Mar 2011:
Hi Lolly!
This is exciting, this is my first question!
I’ve always been interested in how things grow and develop, and was always asking my mum lots of questions about how babies grew inside you when she was pregnant with my little brother. This interest stayed with me I guess and I knew that I wanted to study science at university as it was my best subject.
I’d never really heard of stem cells until I went to university and thats when I first heard about embryonic stem cells and I was fascinated by what they could do. Then my first job let me loose on working on stem cells, and since then I’ve remained interested in how they help us grow into what we are and also how we can use them in medicine.
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Kara Cerveny answered on 12 Mar 2011:
This is a good question. Sometimes, in science, you can start with a simple question and then do a few experiments. Those experiments and their results can lead you in directions that you don’t anticipate, and this is what happened to me. Initially, I was interested in the developmental biology of sight, particularly how embryonic cells turn into neurons in the eye. This led me to investigate the properties of retinal stem cells in the developing zebra fish, focusing particularly on the question of how cells know to when to stop growing and dividing.
fyi: some background on vision and stem cells.
–the retina is the part of the eye that contains lots of specialized neurons — the photoreceptors sense light, they transmit an electro-chemical signal to other neurons in the eye, called retinal ganglion cells, which pass the information onto the brain.
–fish retinae (the plural of retina) contain a distinct stem cell zone where all the stem cells, which can give rise to all types of retinal cells because their eyes continue to grow throughout their life. this is distinct from mammals (animals like you and me) whose eyes stop growing at birth. We study fish eyes and fish retinal stem cells to gain insight into how these special cells are maintained and regulated with the hope of being able to use that information to inform treatments for diseases including many forms of cancer including retinoblastoma as well as many forms of blindness such as macular degeneration. -
Jayne Charnock answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Its super exciting and something that always gets people talking at parties! That wasnt strictly the reason why i started out in this area but i do love explaining my research to people and how it might be helpful in curing the diseases i work on in the future
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James Chan answered on 16 Mar 2011:
I chose stem cell research cos I really believe it’s going to be the next big thing! We’ve found out so much about how this technology can help us treat lots of different diseases over the past few years, and I think it’s nearly time for us to make that bold step and make use of it in humans! I really want to be part of this crusade – it’s like some of the other great medical advances, e.g. discovery of antibiotics saved literally millions of people, the use of anaesthesia has allowed us to do all sorts of operations, including heart operations where we stop the heart temporarily… I think stem cell research has that potential to be HUGE! It’d be awesome to be able to look back in future and say that I was a part of that!
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Emma King answered on 18 Mar 2011:
Hi lolly107 – I did Genetics at University and was always interested in stem cells but we didn’t learn much about them. Then I was offered a PhD which involved looking at the ethical, legal and social implications of stem cell technology – so I decided that I wanted to go for it. So it was a mix of being interested and then having to learn more about them do good research for my project!
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