Question: i read you answer to how old were you when you wanted to be a scientist and i think its really interestin that you wnted to be a writer so was it just doing well in your exam that you wanted to be a scientist or do you think the job was made for you ???

Emily Cook answered on 17 Mar 2010:

Thanks for the interest!

It wasn’t just doing well in exams – my english results have always been ok too. It was more that the older I got the more science interested me.

In primary school I didn’t really do any science at all so writing stories was a bigger part of my life and I suppose thats why I wanted to be a writer. In the first few years of secondary school science seemed to be learning the names of things and heating water over a bunsen burner, which didn’t interest me much either. It was only when it got to GCSE and you start doing more complicated experiments and understanding more about how things work that it really captured my imagination. Also by that point in English we were reading Macbeth for the third time and it didn’t seem as important to me as learning about renewable energy sources and genetics.

One of the great things about working in science is that I still get to write. I’m writing about all kinds of things this week on I’m a scientist, I’ve written research papers about my work and I’ve written a book about medical physics that the Institue of Physics sent out to schools a few years ago. Not quite best-selling novels but still fun to do. If i was a writer I doubt I’d get to do much science….