• Question: what is your favourite experiment?

    Asked by anon-251554 to Anabel on 23 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Anabel Martinez Lyons

      Anabel Martinez Lyons answered on 23 Apr 2020:

      I used to do an experiment where I ran mice on a circular treadmill called a rotarod. Mice with brain problems wouldn’t be able to adjust their grip or speed to the treadmill very well, whereas healthy mice would be able to walk on it for ages. If a mouse couldn’t hold on, they’d drop a few inches and wait at the bottom of the machine until the next test began, and it was very sweet to observe them and see their progress over time. That was definitely my favourite experiment :-).

Comments

  • Photo: anon-251554

    anon-251554 commented on :

    thank you for your reply, I really enjoyed reading it.

  • Photo: Delma

    Delma commented on :

    My favourite experiment is a historical one and comes with a warning: do not try this at home.

    In the early 1980s, doctors believed that gastric ulcers were brought on by anything ranging from stress to spicy foods. Two scientists, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, suspected that these ulcers were cause by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. They could recover H. pylori from ulcer patients, but they had trouble showing that H. pylori caused ulcers. So they decided to test their hypothesis that H. pylori causes ulcers on the only patient they could recruit: Barry Marshall. Barry drank a culture of H. pylori and, over the course of several days, became ill and was diagnosed with a gastric ulcer. He recovered H. pylori from a biopsy of his gastric ulcer and demonstrated that a course of antibiotics was enough to wipe out H. pylori and cure his ulcer. Today, we have plenty of data that shows that 80-90% of gastric ulcers are caused by H. pylori. Barry and Robin won the Nobel Prize for their discovery in 2005.