• Question: How did you come across your idea to build your latest invention

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 24 Jun 2014:


      The need for developing new antibiotics is quite well known as bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to our existing drugs and we have been failing to develop new ones to replace these. We came up with protein targets to investigate by looking at what proteins bacteria needed to survive, then we looked at how different these proteins were to ones in humans so we could try and selectively target bacteria. We also assessed how common these proteins were in different bacterial species as we wanted to develop broad-spectrum antibiotics which target multiple species of bacteria. This gave us a list of proteins that we could try and solve the structure of and design drugs to target.

    • Photo: Phillip Manning

      Phillip Manning answered on 25 Jun 2014:


      One of my students came up with a great new idea for a clever experimental stage that we use at Diamond. I always listen to my students, as they often have better solutions to problems that I have. Learning is a two way street.

    • Photo: Lynne Thomas

      Lynne Thomas answered on 25 Jun 2014:


      We tend to work in a big team and develop things together often at Diamond Light Source. My team at the moment have been working on ways to allow us to watch atoms move on the nanoscale time scale (that’s 0.000000001 seconds!). To do this, we as a team, have had to come up with some clever electronics and we have to get a laser and X-ray beam to fire at our crystal at precisely the right time to let us do this. I can’t take much of the credit for this but I think I’m quite a good sounding board at times!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 25 Jun 2014:


      The scariest thing about starting my PhD was trying to come up with a good idea of what to do it on!
      I asked lots of people who work in the same area as me what they thought and had a look at things that had already been done and filled the gap that was missing! Some of the best ideas for inventions are ones that are completely out of the blue or happen by mistake – you think “how did they ever think to try that?”

Comments