I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying theĀ causes and processes ofĀ illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
We don’t get many things out of the ordinary come through the lab – but every now and then something will come that has us reaching for the textbooks and phone to call the Pathologists in Perth. If we do come across something unusual, eg a rare form of leukaemia (acute promyelocytic leukaemia) was first diagnosed in our lab late last year in a patient we often don’t see any follow up because we are in the country and the patient will need to go to Perth for treatment.
The most “common” weird things we get in Geraldton are from people who have been travelling, especially to places like Bali and South-East Asia. Every six months or so we will see a case of malaria which can be difficult to diagnose if the doctor or patient doesn’t tell us the patient has travelled to an area where it is found.
Probably some of the strangest things I have seen in my career are not samples from people, but from animals. Occasionally a local vet surgery will ask us to run a sample on our machine for them – I once had to do a potassium level on cow eye fluid!
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I’ve not seen much out of the ordinary in our lab, because we only work on a few, like cachexia and hypertension, so we generally only get things that we expect to see. I’ve accidentally grown some unusual bacteria and mould when the cells I was growing got contaminated though š
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Sometimes you hear about a disease you haven’t heard about before yes! But our lab looks at obesity and diabetes, so they are common diseases. But sometimes we find out about special genes or proteins that are important in these diseases that we didn’t know about before.
The craziest thing I ever saw was when I did my autopsy during uni. One of the bodies we had to dissect had all the organs swapped around. So what should be on the left was right and the other way around!
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I don’t work in a lab that does that sort of thing; I use the work of other people who do look for diseases to search for patterns in how viruses and other parasites evolve, so I’ve never seen anything unfamiliar myself. I’ve talked with and worked with people who have, though! One of the labs I work with has been important in discovering all the varieties of norovirus (a group of viruses that cause ‘gastroenteritis’, what people often call the stomach flu).
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