Meet the scientists!

I work at the Centre for Reproductive Health in Edinburgh as a PhD student looking at what triggers labour in pregnant women.

It’s important to study this sort of thing because if scientists can understand what happens to make pregnant women to go into labour at the end of 9 months, then we might be able to understand what ‘goes wrong’ when women go into labour too early.

The earlier a baby is born the higher the chance that they could be seriously ill, so it’s important that we understand more about premature labour so that we can start working on treatments to stop it happening.

I’m currently building a ‘computer model’ of some of the things that happen at the end of pregnancy that might trigger labour. Hopefully my model will tell us a bit more about which proteins and which reactions are most important in causing premature labour.

There are three important things I have to do to build a good computer model:

1) Reading – finding out what other scientists think happens just before labour and what they think the important things to look out for might be

2) Modelling – A large part of my time is spent sitting at my computer feeding the model with information and playing around with it to see what happens if I remove certain chemicals or change how fast a reaction takes place etc.

3) Lab experiments – I need to carry out lots of experiments on real human uterus cells to make sure that my computer model behaves in the same way as a real human cell would. There’s no point building a computer model if it doesn’t behave like it should! I grow lots of uterus cells in plastic flasks and measure how much protein the cells produce under different conditions.

The activity stall is called the Egg and Sperm Race, and the website is here.

There’s a really cool game on the site where you have to navigate a sperm through the female reproductive tract to reach the egg. It’s so hard  (just like real life!).

We definitely have a place at Green Man music festival this August,  so now I desperately need to raise some money to help put together something really fun and interesting to take along. That’s why it’d be super awesome if I won I’m a Scientist (hint hint!).

At the festival, we plan to use a model railway to illustrate how hard it is for a sperm cell to find an egg cell (I know, model railway, sounds unlikely right? Well we’re giving it a go!) and then show how it’s even MORE difficult if either partner has an untreated sexually transmitted infection. We’re also putting on an activity called ‘Celebrity Babies’ where we explain the genetics behind things like eye colour and hair colour and then see what the babies of different celebrity couples might look like!

There are loads of other things we want to take along too, like these amazingly cute sperm  toys:

and an egg cell pinata that you hit with sticks with sperm dolls stuck on the end until jelly babies come out!

We’re also handing out free condoms and free Chlamydia testing kits.

But all these things cost money so vote for me please so that I can make a really good activity stall and get people thinking about the science behind sex!