• Question: What is the hardest problem you have solved?

    Asked by 969putk46 to Pete on 16 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Pete Gwynne

      Pete Gwynne answered on 16 Nov 2017:


      some of the questions we’ve been asked here were pretty tough! the most difficult set of experiments i’ve done though were the ones to get my second degree. we wanted to find out about a part of a bacteria, and one of the ways you can do that is by making loads and loads of them that are nearly the same but each one has a tiny difference. then you can test if any of the tiny differences have much of an effect in how the bacteria behave. i had to make 75,000 different bacteria, but in the end one of them did something interesting. it took ages!
      —–
      (i actually had to do it twice, because the first time i messed up but didn’t realise until the end.)

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