• Question: Did you want to be a scientist when you were growing up?

    Asked by gracec2001 to Aled, Ellie, Fiona, Kev, Willem on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Aled Roberts

      Aled Roberts answered on 12 Mar 2014:


      Hi grace2001!

      I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up! If anything I wanted to be an astronaught or a pilot! However as I went though school I found that I really liked biology, particularly learning about flesh eating bacteria and viruses that could wipe out the human population! Now I’m interested in saving the human population be developing new treatments to kill bacteria!

      Still… I would mind working in the top government research facility in Porton Down! They are doing some incredible stuff there! 🙂

    • Photo: Fiona Heesen

      Fiona Heesen answered on 12 Mar 2014:


      Hi gracec2001,

      I don’t think I really knew what I wanted to be when I was growing up – at different times I wanted to be a lawyer, a baker, own and run a bed and breakfast hotel and many other professions! I think what ultimately steered me in the path that I currently follow is that whatever it was that I wanted to do, I always wanted to make sure that I found it interesting, that it allowed me to be creative, and that it gave me the freedom to be able to learn new things – and so I ended up being a scientist!

      Thanks for the question 🙂

      Fiona

    • Photo: Kevin Arbuckle

      Kevin Arbuckle answered on 12 Mar 2014:


      I might be slightly unusual, but absolutely! Since I was a kid I’ve always wanted to become a scientist. I can remember being very young, about 5ish, and the first job that I wanted to do was a palaeontologist (studying fossils). This was mostly because of my interest in dinosaurs and other reptiles from the same time, but I soon discovered that I’m not particularly good with, or interested in, bones. I do still enjoy the same bits of biology but I consider now that I more like ‘palaeobiology’ than ‘palaeontology’. Palaeobiology is very similar but is more focussed on the animals live’s and how they lived (diet, predators, running speeds, etc.) than their bones. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do some work on this in the future, but for now my interest is even more general and covers evolutionary biology and more.

    • Photo: Eleanor Parker

      Eleanor Parker answered on 12 Mar 2014:


      Hi Gracec2001,
      I don’t think I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I was growing up, but I was always really interested in the natural world and definitely wanted to do something that involved that.

    • Photo: Willem Heijltjes

      Willem Heijltjes answered on 13 Mar 2014:


      Hi Gracec,

      When I was young, I didn’t really want to become anything! But I did want to learn new things all the time, so I guess becoming a scientist was a natural thing to do!

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