What initially interested you in the area of science that you work in?

Question: What initially interested you in the area of science that you work in?
- Keywords:
  career choice,
  inspiration
Asked by anon-292590 on 21 Apr 2021. This question was also asked by anon-292576.
- Quentin Leclerc answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  My main interest is infectious diseases. The things that cause diseases are often invisible (bacteria, viruses…), yet they can travel and have really complicated interactions! With covid for example, it’s crazy to imagine that it just started in one small place, but then spread all around the world. It’s this idea of “invisible but powerful” that made me interested in learning more about infectious diseases, to hopefully stop them from being a problem for us!
- Steve Briddon answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  My main area of research is pharmacology – which is about how drugs work on the body.
  
  I always loved chemistry, but when I was at University, I got really fascinated by how drugs work on the brain. I found it amazing that small molecules, like morphine (a pain killer) or hallucinogens (like LSD) could change the way we think and perceive the world. It made me want to try and understand how that works!
- Neil Guthrie answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  I work in Sport, Exercise and Health Science and it was my interest in these 3 topics that initially interested me. Being able to study Sport, Exercise and Health at University seemed amazing to me when I was leaving school. It is important to understand that this area goes far deeper than watching football or running about a sports hall though, which some would lead you to believe! 🙂
- Sian Green answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  Well it sounds a bit simple, but honestly, I just like animals. I find them interesting and watching them, even just on tv, makes me happy. I enjoy being out in nature and knowing their are wild animals living around and want other people to be able to enjoy that too
- Ed Peake answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  My Grandad worked in nuclear medicine in a hospital, I always thought his job was really cool. I chose to do physics at University and loved the idea of working in a hospital as a clinical scientist.
- Adriana Toutoudaki answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  I always wanted to be a medical doctor. But when I went to university I discovered how many more disciplines there were. I really enjoyed the computational workshops we had and started getting excited about bioinformatics. You can do so much with computers by knowing a bit of programming so I could combine my biological education with programming and make a difference. And what’s best? I can use my skills to save patients which was my initial motivation to become a doctor. 🙂
- Lucile Crete answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  I work as an archaeologist, more specifically on Prehistory and Human Evolution. I was initially interested in archaeology because I loved History, and thought it was amazing to be able to find objects or bones from people or animals that lived so long ago. It felt like archaeology was like detective work, and that through this work the scientists could then tell us the stories of these people that lived in a very different world from ours, and that these stories would have been lost without the work of the archaeologists.
  
  I particularly like working on Prehistory because archaeology is the only way to understand how people lived, how they looked, what their environments looked like, when we go that far back in time (up to about 4 million years ago) – as there was no writing back then.
- Rosie Goodburn answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  Towards the end of my physics degree, I started to think about the kind of job I wanted to do on a day-to-day basis. Medical Physics really appealed to me because I could be using my skills in physics and maths and applying them to something that would make a difference in quite a practical and direct way! There are actually quite a few types of Medical Physicists who work in hospitals. The different types might be involved with treating patients with radiation or keeping the imaging scanners working well!
- Kip Heath answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  I find viruses absolutely fascinating. They’re not alive. They have no wants or interests or feelings. And yet, one little virus called SARS-CoV-2 has brought the entire world almost to a standstill. (It causes covid-19).
  
  Viruses can beat us easily and they’re not even trying!
- Ross Low answered on 21 Apr 2021:
  
  I love working on evolution. I like the fact that everything we have; cells, eyes, and hands have a reason and you can see how other living things have evolved to be different.
  
  I like working with DNA because it’s a very easy way of seeing how things evolve and what differences there are between them.
  
  The reason I like parasites is that they have some of the most extreme features in nature, their whole evolution is targeted at getting into you and causing disease. Imagine a chef with knives for hands or a doctor with a stethoscope for ears!
- Rebecca Reed answered on 22 Apr 2021:
  
  I work on human ageing, but it isn’t what I originally wanted to research at first. I’m really interested in how the brain works, and how diseases like dementia and motor neuron disease happen – what goes wrong, how can we fix it. But what I’ve found with studying ageing is that this applies to all of the things I’m interested in, as well as a lot of other diseases. A lot of the processes that go wrong in diseases like dementia, diabetes and heart disease can be linked to changes in our cells as we age, so it was a really cool way to study something that applies to lots of different conditions. I like the idea that there could be something that a lot of diseases have in common that we could treat.
- Michael Capeness answered on 23 Apr 2021:
  
  My teachers at GCSE and 6th Form, particular my tutor. She pushed me (nicely) to apply to university and look at science related jobs. I also had science teachers who were quite engaging, and fun, which made even the most difficult bits of science interesting.

Question: What initially interested you in the area of science that you work in?

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