TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well I suppose I had three heroes when I was a school boy. Darwin was one, and I actually read “The Origins of Species” from cover to cover and just loved it... was blown away by the clarity of the argument and the beautiful writing... even today you can enjoy it. And what I liked was the way... I mean lots of people have commented on it of course... the way he drew in arguments from lots of different sources of evidence to show the power of natural selection. I think today people get too bent on one particular experiment and showing statistically, hammering away, how powerful that result is, and often... I mean, Darwin didn't use any statistics, of course, in “The Origin of Species”, but what makes his argument convincing is these independent lines of evidence... so there's almost no numbers in his argument... so I think we get today maybe a little bit too keen on numbers and statistics rather than thinking more broadly about independent evidence.”
-Nick Davies, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavior Ecology, University of Cambridge
“Not to get too wedded to techniques. There are some people who only do, like you doing mass-spec, and that's all they'll ever do. There are other people who are experts in genetic manipulation, and so on... and what I've found from my research was that I never got stuck with a technique.”
-Sir Michael Berridge, Ph.D.
Emeritus Fellow of Cell Signaling, Babraham Institute
“I have more admiration for the people who put two and two together in rather less obvious ways, and suddenly realize that a technique developed there can actually be applied to a question sitting over there for the last fifty-years that nobody knows the answer to; and, where they really are the only person who has realized that we can now address a classic problem. The examples that I like are probably rather specialized examples, but for example there has been a debate for the last century about the arthropod head, and how many segments make up the arthropod head. On the basis of comparative morphology it's almost impossible to answer. There were a few people who suddenly realized that HOX genes might provide an answer to this, and so Max Telford was one of them who started working on Chelicerates and looking at where HOX genes were expressed in Chelicerates and showing, pretty clearly actually, that the then dominate model of how you could relate the heads of a Chelicerates (something like a spider or a mite) to insects, was not right, and that instead there was a different correspondence mapped by the genes. So he was looking at an old argument in comparative morphology and suddenly saying, "Ahh, the molecular biology might give us an answer to that.”
-Michael Acam, Ph.D.
Head of Department and Professor of Zoology, University of Cambridge
“I think you have to take risks. If you think, “The best way to get at this question is to do something I've never done before and I'm not sure I understand it very well,” I think you have to take the plunge. There is new technology coming up all the time, I mean here's an example – doing gene editing using this CRISPR system. Everybody here in the building is talking about doing it, nobody is doing it, everybody is waiting for somebody else to do it first and iron out all the bugs. I'm very lucky that a student in my lab has said, "I'll do it, I'll get it working." I think that kind of risk taking, even though it might mean that it takes her longer to get it working out than it would if somebody else worked it out first and she could be biding her time doing something different... I think that's great. I think that's a good sign about her as a student.
I think that when you're running a lab as well you may be a little bit outside your comfort zone if people get into heavy duty bioinformatics say, which I can't pretend I understand. But after a while you have more of a gut feeling about things; you understand things well enough that you know what's sensible and what's not sensible. If somebody uses some fancy technique that is a little bit beyond you and then the results make no sense whatsoever… sometimes there is something wrong with how they are applying the technique, other times it is just something completely unexpected. So I think you have to take risks – I think if that kind of thing happens then you probably need to kind of bone up a little bit on the technique and see whether it's because of some flaw with how it's being used or whether it's because it's just different than how we assumed all along.”
-Margaret Scott Robinson, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, University of Cambridge
“The other trait I think that's actually important is to really pay attention to data that don't fit. I think often novel insights come from little quirky things that just at first don't make sense, and if you keep worrying away at it often those are the key to some new idea.”
-Nick Davies, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavior Ecology, University of Cambridge
“When I decided I was doing experiments and sort of repeating and getting the same sort of result I should stop, sit down, and read. Take a week or two out, and just read to try and find a new avenue to approach rather than go in... some people just feel they've got to be in the lab doing experiments, pipetting, running gels, day in day out –they don't spent enough time thinking why they are doing these experiments.”
-Sir Michael Berridge, Ph.D.
Emeritus Fellow of Cell Signaling, Babraham Institute
“Lots of the experiments I've done don't work at first because I just haven't got the system right. I'll give you one very simple example (this is work I did with Becky Kilner). So, we have a little nest full of begging Reed Warbler all begging for food from their Reed Warbler parents. If a cuckoo parasitizes that nest, when the cuckoo hatches out it throws all the Reed Warbler eggs out of the nest and you just end up with a cuckoo in the nest. And yet, the Reed Warblers behave to this cuckoo just as if it were a whole brood of Reed Warbler. So the question we asked is... well we were trying to explain why these Reed Warblers were apparently so stupid to feed this enormous cuckoo when their geared up to raise a brood of their own chicks. And we thought maybe it's something about the cuckoo that the Reed Warbler find irresistible. So we thought maybe it's just the fact the cuckoo is so big the leads the Reed Warbler to love it so much.
To test that we wanted to put a big chick of another species in just to see if Reed Warbler would love a big chick as much as a cuckoo chick, and we put a black bird chick in. A black bird is a thrush, and it's about the size of a cuckoo. And when we put the black bird chick in the nest the black bird chick just wouldn't beg. It just sat there and didn't beg and the Reed Warbler wouldn't feed it. And we thought this experiment is just not going to work. And then we realized that the black bird lives in a stable nest whereas the reeds are swinging around in the wind all the time. So as soon as we anchored the nest with a bamboo cane so that it was stable the black bird immediately started begging and the Reed Warbler would feed it.
It would have been very easy to abandon that experiment but we persisted. We hadn't got the sort of, the setup right. So I think that applies to lots of experiments. People who've got green fingers and get experiments to work are often people who are fussy about getting the setup right: clean apparatus or bamboo cane or some little trick and that's all that's needed for the difference between success and failure.”
-Nick Davies, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavior Ecology, University of Cambridge