HEALTHCARE SCIENTIST

HELEN HUNTER (NAOMI’S MUM)

Aspirations Week @ Oak Tree Primary School

Who is a healthcare scientist?

What do we do?

• Help to find out what is wrong if you are sick

• Help to prevent illness

• Help to treat illness

• Save lives and improve lives

How do we do that?!

• Use special equipment (not just microscopes) to do tests and treatments

• Use our knowledge and training to find new and better ways of keeping you healthy

• Work with doctors and nurses in hospitals and the community

Don’t always look like scientists

Lots of different careers:

• Reconstructive Science

• Informatics

Lots of different careers:

• Audiology

• Opthalmic Science

Lots of different careers:

• Haematology

• Microbiology

• Genomics

Lots of different careers:

• Reproductive Science (the best one)

• Embryologists and Andrologists

What I do…

• Sometimes people need extra help to start a baby growing

• They come to see Doctors and Scientists at the hospital

Test Tube babies

Louise Brown was born 25th July 1978 in Oldham

More than 250,000 babies born in the UK since then!

About 1 in 10 babies born each year

More than 5 million in the world!

Prof Robert Edwards: Embryologist and Nobel Prize Winner

How IVF works

Everybody starts this way:

Some of you in the body and some in the lab! No way to tell.

Timelapse video

How big is a human embryo?

• Size of a grain of pollen?

• 0.03mm

• Size of a human hair?

• 0.1mm

• Size of a grain of rice?

• 5.5mm

• Size of a chicken egg?

• 57mm

How big is a human egg/embryo?

Microscopes

How we look after eggs and embryos

Embryoscope Incubator

Embryoscope slide

Freezing embryos