• Question: what is the greatest thing you have ever seen?

    Asked by 424gdna25 to Clare, Arthur, Daniel, David, Tora on 7 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Tora Smulders-Srinivasan

      Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      It’s hard to choose!

      The Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls (in the USA)

      My first glimpse of each of my sons when they were born.

      Looking at the moon or Saturn on a really big telescope

      Neurons (brain/nerve cells) under a fluorescent microscope (they glow red or green under certain lights)

      I’m sure I could go on for a while, but I’ll stop here. 🙂

    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      I got to travel to the Galápagos Islands a while ago (where Darwin did some of his work on evolution) and got to see the last ever Pinta Island Tortoise (called Lonesome George!) before he died which was a real treat.

      In the lab, the coolest thing is getting to meet the first few people who have had some viruses given to them to beat cancer and see them still alive 3 years later despite being told they only had months to live… That makes it worth all the hard work!

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      Wow! so much to choose from!
      I have to say its the arrival of Lucie and Oliver – my daughter and son – magical moments.

      On other things – well 2 years ago my wife bought me a decent telescope for Christmas and I took it in to the back garden on a clear January night and saw Galileo’s moons around Jupiter. He was the fisrt person to see these in the telesciope he made and from that he worked out how the Earth moves around the Sun rather than the Sun moving around the Earth….as here I was 4 to 5 hundred years later seeing the same things he saw! Pretty cool!

      In terms of my own science it was seeing and working on the Mekong river in full monsoon flood last year. It was incredible – the river discharge was 60,000 cubic meters of water every second – that is enough water to fill an olympic size swiming pool in about 2 seconds….every second, all day and night as long as the flood went on….incredible volumes of water.

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