In the actual experiment sometimes the most interesting thing to see is when it changes colour unexpectedly or gives off a gas and bubbles.
By far the most interesting (and sometimes frustrating!) thing that happens is when the reaction doesn’t do what you expect it to. Sometimes I get a completely different product to what I was expecting. When this happens, the challenge is to find out what actually happened and that can be really interesting. It’s what science is all about.
Loads of scientific discoveries have been made when things have gone “wrong”. Penicillin, Viagra and even Post-It notes were all discovered by accident so it’s not always bad!
For me, it was seeing just how quickly bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics. In the lab, this can happen within a matter of hours, under the right conditions It’s scary to think about the same thing happening in the body when you take an antibiotic, but it inspires me to study resistance to help figure out how to stop it.
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