Question: Do you enjoy doing experiment and how do you do them ?

Michael Taggart answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Yeah, thinking up new experiments to try and answer a biological question and then seeing if they work out is the best thing about my job. For us, an example of how we’d do an experiment would be along the following lines:
Q. say we had a question of how does drug X make an artery more active?

We’d take a tiny piece of artery tissue that we have surgically dissected under a microscope, with string or wire that’s about the size of one of your hairs on your head we would tie the artery tissue to another piece of equipment that measures how the artery contracts or relaxes (the job of an artery is to contract and relax in order to move blood through the body), we’d place the artery tissue in a solution that is similar to that of our blood, heat it up to body temperature (37oC, so, really, trying to keep everything as close to how it would be in our body as is possible) and then add to that solution some of the drug X. We’d then have our eyes glued to a computer screen which would show us a coloured line and if it goes up then drug X contracts the artery. If the line goes down it relaxes it and if the line stays steady then drug X does nothing. We’d then have to repeat the experiment lots and lots with different amounts of drug X and for different times and on different tissues to be sure if any effect (or no effect) was real.
As we do some of our experiments on pieces of blood vessels from humans then we can make a prediction of whether drug X might increase or reduce blood pressure in real life.
Does that make sense?