• Question: What is the most exciting discovery you have ever made?

    Asked by polkadot8 to Del, Catherine, John, Krishna, Mo Rassul on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by , proffessoratom0901, , sunshine246.
    • Photo: Catherine Mansfield

      Catherine Mansfield answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Thanks for your question.
      For me the most exciting discovery I have made was discovering the cause of a condition called ‘Broken Heart Syndrome’. This is a heart problem with symptoms very similar to a heart attack. It happens after a very sudden and severe stress such as if someone very close to you dies (which is why it is called Broken Heart Syndrome). The patients are often brought to hospital thinking they are having a heart attack but they are not. We discovered that this condition is caused by a huge release of a chemical called adrenaline which causes the heart to become ‘shocked’. Now that we have a better understanding of the cause of this condition we can start to develop better treatments for it.

    • Photo: Adelle Thrower

      Adelle Thrower answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      The was once a tribe in Africa where lots of patients were having liver failure- the world health organisation (WHO) asked us to try and work out why. We tested the livers and found they all had loads of copper in them- but then the WHO had to work out how this tribe were getting copper poisoning when nearby tribes weren’t- they all shared the same water supply so it wasn’t that…… A real puzzle!!
      I turns out after a LOT of investigation the tribe owned bees as their main source of food was honey- bees are very territorial and only live in a specific vicinity- well, these bees were getting their pollen from flowers who had a high copper content – making copper honey which the tribe were eating!! They told the tribe to relocate the bees away from those flowers and then the problem was solved!!

    • Photo: John Foster

      John Foster answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I discovered that a type of immune cell that helps fight infection in the body, called a “naive T cell”, has something inside its cell membrane that controls what is on the surface of the cell. This affects how the cell moves around the body and even if it lives or dies!

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