Question: What is it like being a scientist?

Sue Carney answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Generally speaking, I’d describe being a scientist as very rewarding. It’s a great feeling to experience science in action — to have a theory or question, test it with an experiment, then find the answer. Forensic science is particularly rewarding because the answers we find can help to get justice for someone who has been the victim of a crime.

Science can also be frustrating because some experiments don’t work or don’t give a useful answer. In forensic science, we might not always find the evidence we’re looking for because other factors mean that the evidence can’t be detected. For example, a crime scene outdoors might be affected if it has rained and some of the evidence, such as DNA or blood stains, have been washed away. Sometimes it can be a race against time to recover all the evidence we can before it has disappeared. Other times the results of tests might be very difficult to interpret because of the limitations of what certain tests can tell us.

Science can also be very tiring work and as a scientist you need to be patient. Some forensic tests, particularly those involving searching or screening an item for something, can take a long time to complete, and the scientist needs to concentrate while they’re doing the searching so they don’t miss anything. Such painstaking work can sometimes be a headache, but I usually make sure I have a break so that I can get my concentration back. It’s also important to have lots of checking procedures in place so that another scientist makes sure that I didn’t miss anything because I was tired. We often discuss our results with colleagues too. This makes sure that our interpretations will stand up to scrutiny and that we haven’t said anything that might be unclear or misinterpreted by whoever reads our statements. We call this a peer review, and it’s a standard across other areas of science too. Most scientists who write anything that’s going to be published in a scientific journal have their work peer reviewed too.