Question: Has there been any major problems during your time as a scientist?

Rory Miles answered on 13 Mar 2014:

I can’t think of any particularly major problems that I have encountered. There’s always lots of small problems going that need solving. When testing samples from patients, this is usually that someone has written the patients name incorrectly. There is a risk that the wrong patient may be given the result for someone else. For this reason, for all experiments using a sample from a patient we check their name and date of birth all the time. It’s a lot of work, but helps to make sure that the patient gets their correct result. Otherwise doctors may think they have infection when really they’re fine (or they have another disease). In research, my problems are generally that my experiment hasn’t worked. Follow the link if you’d like to see how I know if my experiment has failed /caesiumm14-zone/2014/03/12/how-do-you-know-when-your-science-experiments-hasnt-work-right/. Luckily nothing major has happened during my career. But if it does I must report it to senior staff members. This helps them know what went wrong and work out how we can stop the same thing from happening again.