Question: What was the first thing that you experimented?

Oh wow. tough question. I guess that depends on how you define experiment. Even things i did in primary school are still experiments, as it’s all about asking a question and going about getting an answer.

as for my first experiment where someone didnt already know the answer, that was at the end of my second year of uni, when i did a summer scholarship in the infectious diseases lab at IMVS. My project was looking at neisseria ghonorrhoea, yup the STD causing bacteria. These bacteria love to swap DNA back and forth, so designing a test which could detect every strain of them within a day was an issue. So my job was to design special bits of DNA called primers. When you hear DNA which has two strands they separate. If you add in primers which look like a part of one of the strands, they can be joined together instead, and be amplified and then detected. I had several very promising primer sets, but I actually don’t know whether any of them ended up being used in new diagnostic tests as I was only there for 2 months, and these things can take much longer.