Helena Jambor (Germany)
| Hi, I am Helena from Lüneburg/ Northern Germany. I studied biology and at the moment I am doing my PhD at the EMBL in Heidelberg. |
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I work on the development of fruitflies, a species that lives in your garbage at home! Maybe you also heard about the fly in your biology course, because people have been studying it already for more than 100 years!
Why is the fly so interesting for us? In biology, we want to understand how and why animals survive, die, find mates and so on. Doing research with humans would mostly be unethical, so biologists use animals that are comparable to humans and in many ways fruit flies are very similar to us! We also need animals that are easy to farm: flies just need some fruit and at the right temperature they grow happily - in two weeks a baby-fly (larvae) becomes an adult and produces many children. How can the offspring develop so fast? The reason is a very special kind of egg: it is nearly as big as an adult fly and it has information about where to make the head and the end already. I study how the mother fly can make such eggs and how she can deposit all the information in there.
I do a PhD because I want to look at something new, something no one has ever seen before, and in research we do exactly that, every single day! One can compare what we do to the adventures of the 15th century: they were looking for unexplored countries in our world, while we use microscopes to find smaller and smaller structures in the cells of animals. Doing a PhD is not only about finding new things in the cell but also to describe the findings so well that other people can understand it now and still in 100 years! To be sure that what we find is true, we have to repeat our experiments many times. This can get a little boring sometimes!
At school I did not particularly like physics or chemistry or biology. But in the last year I was really fascinated by molecular biology, so I decided to try studying natural sciences anyway. In my spare time, I always did some music and arty-stuff, in fact for a while I thought about studying art instead. I still have some time to be creative, but at the moment I spend all my spare time with my 1-year old son!