• Question: Hi! What is one of the most interesting results you've encountered?

    Asked by yasmin123 to Claire, Greg, Vicki on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Vicki Onions

      Vicki Onions answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      hmmmm, there have been lots of interesting things. The most interesting one i found out in my first year researching whole ovary freezing, i still think is interesting and am curently doing more experiments on it. Bascially, the eggs grow and develop in a fluid filled ball called a follicle – and follicles, and how they are working, are therefore critical to ovarian function and fertility. The follicles grow and within it, the egg grows. Most of the early work in my field looked at freezing small pieces of ovarian tissue that contain the follicles and pretty much everyone said that the freezing process destroyed all the follicles that had grown to a large size (leaving just the very tiny early follicles. However in my first ever experiment freezing whole ovaries rather than strips of tissue, i found out that a lot of the cells in the larger follicles were still alive…and not dead at all!! This disagrees with a lot of top scientists in my field – eeek!
      I guess that sounds a bit dull, but it was a big deal to me! I’m now doing more work to see how long the cells live for after freezing and whether they are still able to produce the hormones they are meant to.

    • Photo: Greg FitzHarris

      Greg FitzHarris answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi there,
      probably my ‘best’ set of results of my career so far was from some experiments I did when I worked in Canada.
      I found that eggs which are sitting in the ovary waiting to be ovulated cant regulate their own pH (acidity within the cell — regulating this is a fundamental process which all cells are supposed to be able to do). What i foiund is that the egg cant do this… but the cells which surround the egg do it extremely well, and because tey are kind of attached to the egg, they in fact do it for the egg too!
      We always knew that the cells around the eggs in the ovary were important for the eggs to be healthy — but didnt really understand what they were doing — and this is a nice clear demomstration of how they ‘support’ the egg.
      Understanding this kind of thing is important in terms of the future of ivf — if we understand whats going on in the ovary, then maybe we can replicate that in a dish and get immature eggs (not ready to be fertilised) to grow and become ‘mature’ eggs in the lab.

    • Photo: Claire O'Donnell

      Claire O'Donnell answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi Yasmin,
      i’m always amazed by the placebo effect. In case you don’t know what this is, it’s when you try a treatment on people and you give half of the people in the study the treatment, say a new drug and the other half a tablet that contains nothing at all ( the people know that this is what is going to happen and are happy to take either the new drug orthe fake without knowing which ) When you look at how they’re done a little while later, there will always be people who say they’ve got a bit better even though they’ve had the fake tablet with nothing in!
      I’ll have a think about other results I’ve seen and update this later:)
      I’ve thought about it and I think I like the finding that following the ban on smoking in public places like pubs, shops etc the number of people who have been admitted to hospital with a heart attack has rocketed down, well over half, none of us expected that so a great result:)

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