Question: how do act when you find out something brand new that no one has ever found out before? and what do you do?

Asked by payphone3 to Cindy, Katelin, Kate, Miranda, Yagiz on 10 Mar 2013.

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  1. Photo: Miranda WeenMiranda Ween
    answered on 10 Mar 2013:

    I get super excited and tell my boss who also gets super excited. I usually feel all bubbly and happy and restless with the excitement for a day or two. Once we have enough data to put together a story about our findings, we write a paper and get it published to share our excitement with the rest of the scientific community. If the finding has enough potential to be a new drug or diagnostic test, we have meetings with the university’s research and innovation team, who help us work out if we need a patent or not.

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  2. Photo: Katelin HaynesKatelin Haynes
    answered on 11 Mar 2013:

    I usually start off with a happy dance in the lab, or in the office. I just get so excited I can’t sit still! Of course, you have to tell other people about what you have found as well, so I’ll tell my supervisor, my students, other people in my lab. It’s just a wonderful feeling, like its your birthday and you just got a super great present!

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  3. Photo: Kate SkulteKate Skulte
    answered on 11 Mar 2013:

    I’m still new into research and have only had this happen once so far (and I’m putting my first research paper together), it was just the best feeling to realise you have discovered something. It renews your energy and excitment for why you are doing this! I did a dance, jumped up and down and ran in circles around the lab because I was so excited! and just like any good news I would straight away tell people who would get excited for me and jump up and down with them together.

    I do get excited about science quite easily so if there is a really hard or tricky experiment I had gotten to work I would act this way too!

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  4. Photo: Yagiz "Biohacker" Alp AksoyYagiz "Biohacker" Alp Aksoy
    answered on 13 Mar 2013:

    If it has a commercial value, go and file a patent for it (it is very expensive to just file a patent and you have to continue paying to keep the patent). I did a discovery in 2008 when I devised a method which can treat one of the world’s dirtiest waste waters known as olive mill waste water. If you haven’t heard it before olive mill waste water is a waste water which comes out of olive mills (as the name suggests) during the olive oil production. It is a huge problem in mediterranean countries including Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, the major olive oil producers. I invented a novel method which is cheap, feasible and effective in full treatment of this waste water. I felt very special at that time. I received phone calls from European newspapers and reporters (I was young and I felt like a pop star…) First thing we did was filing a patent for it. I didn’t have too much savings at that time, so my supervisor paid a significant amount of it – we still hold the patent. It takes years to really apply your discovery into industry, though. It is still in the process. I haven’t made a discovery at that level in molecular biology which I have been doing for the last 7 years. When we get good results, we publish them in peer-reviewed journals. And in science the currency is your publications. The more and the better you publish, the more value you have among scientific society (it sounds a bit cruel but it is much better that people respect you due to your intellect not due to the money you have)

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