Question: Out of all the experiments you have done , which one has resulted in the most surprising outcome? Why did this happen and do you understand why?

Reka Nagy answered on 9 Nov 2016:

Unexpected results are the best part of science! If we knew how every experiment would turn out, there would be no need to do research at all. We might have an idea of what results to expect, so if we get a completely unexpected outcome, we need to be very critical with ourselves to figure out whether this was due to something we did wrong, or whether there is a real scientific explanation behind what we are seeing.

An example from my work is that I use different computer programs to study genetic data, and two of these programs never seem to give similar results. I get a lot of questions about this whenever I present my work, since people expect the same data to give the same results.

This puzzled me at first, too, but having learned about it more now, I realized that there was a genuine difference due to the approaches these programs take towards analyzing the data – one focuses on the genetics in families, while the other looks at genetics in the general population.