Questions to Ask a Biologist
A biologist might spend the week with soil bacteria, zebrafish embryos, a herd of elk or a spreadsheet, so these questions are written to work for any of them. Students interviewing one for a class or a career report can take the six groups in order: their research, lab and field work, how a study is built, the organisms, the surprises and the career. With a single question to spend at a school visit, a lab tour or a public talk, take it from Organisms or Surprises, where the answers come as stories.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Research
What do you study, and what is the main question you are trying to answer?
Why ask it
Get the organism and the question, because a topic such as 'genetics' or 'ecology' is too wide to write up. If the answer runs long, ask what they would see or measure if the answer turned out to be yes, which usually brings it down to a sentence you can open a report with.
Which kind of biologist are you, and what does a different kind do that you never do?
Why ask it
Biology runs from molecules in a tube to whole forests, and an ecologist and a cell biologist can share a building without sharing a single method. The second half of the question marks the edge of their specialty, which is the detail a teacher looks for when you describe who you interviewed.
What first made you want to be a biologist: an animal or plant, a class, a teacher?
Why ask it
Expect a pond, a pet, a dissection or one good teacher more often than a career plan. Some will say they began in physics, computing or chemistry and moved across, and then the thing to find out is what they brought with them.
What have you found out that nobody knew before you did?
Why ask it
Most findings are small: where a protein sits in a cell, what a beetle eats in winter, which gene a mutant is missing. Let them tell it at that size, then ask what it was like in the days when they were the only person who knew.
Why does your research matter to someone who will never read one of your papers?
Why ask it
Some biologists answer with a use, such as a crop, a disease or a species at risk, and others say plainly that it is worth knowing for its own sake. Write down which kind of answer you got, since it usually matches who pays for the work.
At what scale do you work: molecules, cells, whole organisms, or populations and ecosystems?
Why ask it
Scale settles most of the rest of the interview: the tools, the schedule and whether there is a field season at all. A good second question is what they lose sight of at that scale, which tends to be the reason they have collaborators.
What was already known when you began, and what gap were you aiming at?
Why ask it
Their answer is the background section of a class report, straight from the source. Leave with the title of one article or book they would hand a beginner, so you have something to cite as well as someone to quote.
What is still unknown about what you study that most people assume was settled long ago?
Why ask it
Works well at a talk or a school visit, where it corrects the idea that biology is a finished book of facts to memorize. What it would take to find out is the natural next step: a new tool, more years of data, or simply someone to pay for it.
Lab and Field
Is your work mostly at a bench, at a computer or outdoors, and has that mix shifted during your career?
Why ask it
Plenty of biologists who trained with a pipette or a pair of binoculars now spend most of their week on data and writing. The shift is the part a career project should record, since the job at forty can look little like the job at twenty-five.
What was the first thing you did when you got to work today?
Why ask it
Feeding, watering, checking an incubator or reading an overnight run tends to come before any email, because living material does not wait. A small concrete answer like that is an easy way to start the part of your write-up about their day.
Who looks after the living things on weekends and holidays?
Why ask it
Cultures need fresh medium, animals need feeding and a freezer alarm can go off at three in the morning. You will hear about a duty schedule, a technician or an animal care team, and that is a job in biology your project might otherwise miss.
If you do fieldwork, where do you go, for how long, and what goes in the bag?
Why ask it
The packing list is more telling than the destination: sample tubes, a notebook that survives rain, spare batteries, a first aid kit. Permits and land access work differently from place to place, so whose permission they need to be there is a fair thing to add.
What can your equipment show you that your own eyes cannot?
Why ask it
A microscope, a sequencer, a camera trap and a tracking tag each extend the senses in a different direction. On a lab tour, request a look for yourself: half a minute at an eyepiece stays with you longer than the explanation does.
How much of your week is spent writing code or working through data?
Why ask it
Hear this before you choose courses if part of biology's appeal was getting away from math. A lot of biologists say they learned to program on the job and not in a class, so find out which language or program they use and how they picked it up.
What do you wear or do to protect yourself, and what do you do to protect the samples from you?
Why ask it
In biology the barrier works in both directions: gloves and a lab coat keep the sample off you, and they keep your skin cells and microbes out of the sample. A contamination story usually follows, and it explains rules that look fussy from outside.
Which task have you repeated hundreds of times, and what do you listen to while you do it?
Why ask it
Counting, pipetting, sorting and labeling make up a large share of the work, and the light second half makes that easy to admit. If a machine has since taken the task over, what it freed them to do is the better story.
Who is on your team, and what does each person do?
Why ask it
A research group is a small organization: someone who leads it, researchers on contracts, students, technicians, sometimes volunteers. For a career project, draw the roles as a ladder and mark the rung each person started on.
Is there a room here that visitors cannot enter, and what is the reason?
Why ask it
One for a lab tour. Restricted rooms usually exist for containment, cleanliness or the calm of the animals, and the reason is a short lesson in how the work is protected. Take the answer as given and do not ask to be let in.
Method
How do you shrink a big question into something one experiment or one field season can test?
Why ask it
Big questions about life get answered in small pieces: one gene, one pond, one season. Have them state the prediction they wrote down beforehand. A study with no prediction is closer to a survey, which is also legitimate, and it helps to know which of the two you are hearing about.
What is your control, and what could you not conclude without it?
Why ask it
The control is the comparison group that gets everything except the treatment being tested. If you are designing a science fair project, describe your own control and let them pick holes in it, since it is an easy piece to leave out.
How many animals, plants or samples do you need before you trust a result, and who decides the number?
Why ask it
Living things vary from one individual to the next, so a single mouse or a single leaf settles nothing. The answer may involve a statistician and a calculation done before the study starts, and you do not need to follow the math to note that the number was planned and not guessed.
How do you stop your own hopes from steering what you see?
Why ask it
Listen for practical habits: assigning individuals to groups at random, labeling samples with codes, having someone score the results without knowing which group is which. A biologist who answers quickly has probably been caught out by this once, and that is the story to draw out.
What makes a living thing harder to experiment on than a chemical or a machine?
Why ask it
They grow, fall ill, die, vary, and sometimes behave differently because someone is watching. Pick whichever of those gives them the most trouble and have them explain what they do about it. That is a piece of method no textbook lists.
What sets the pace of your work: a generation time, a growing season, a breeding cycle?
Why ask it
Bacteria can divide within hours, flies breed within weeks and a tree may take years to flower, so the organism decides how many attempts fit into a career. The number of rounds of their main experiment they have completed so far makes the point in one figure.
Who has to approve a study before you are allowed to begin?
Why ask it
Work with animals, human volunteers, protected species or engineered organisms usually goes through a review committee or needs a permit first. The names and rules differ by country and institution, so ask how it works where they are and how long the last approval took.
Which of your experiments failed in the most useful way?
Why ask it
A failure that taught them something is easier to talk about than failure in general. Get the cause (a dead culture, a storm, a wrong assumption) and the change they made afterward, and you have a paragraph on how science corrects itself.
Could another lab repeat your study from what you wrote down, and has anyone tried?
Why ask it
Repeating work is how a single result becomes accepted knowledge, and it happens less often than outsiders assume. Sharing is what makes a repeat possible, so get the list of what leaves their lab: the protocol, the raw data, the code, sometimes the organisms themselves.
When an experiment is impossible, as with a wild population or something that happened long ago, how do you test an idea?
Why ask it
Much of ecology and evolution rests on careful comparison, long records and natural experiments, where an island, a fire or a fence does the manipulating. Their answer is a good cure for the belief that science always means a test in a lab.
What happens between finishing a study and seeing it published?
Why ask it
You should hear about writing it up, sending it to a journal, and other scientists reviewing it before it is accepted or turned down. Have them describe what the reviewers wanted changed last time, and peer review turns into an argument between people instead of a stamp.
Organisms
Which organism do you work with, and why that one and not a relative?
Why ask it
Research organisms are often chosen for practical reasons: fast breeding, see-through embryos, a small genome, a size that fits on a shelf. The reason tells you what the organism is standing in for, which may be something much larger or harder to study.
Where do your organisms or samples come from?
Why ask it
Possible answers include a colony bred in the building, a stock center that mails out strains, a collecting trip under permit, a hospital, a museum drawer or a farm. Each source comes with its own rules, and those vary by place, so ask how it works for them.
What do they need to stay healthy: food, temperature, light, company?
Why ask it
Keeping organisms well is a craft in itself, and a stressed animal or a sickly plant gives results nobody can trust. A class can compare the answer with what a pet or a houseplant needs, which makes the lab seem less remote.
Can you tell individuals apart, and do any of them have names?
Why ask it
A good one for a younger child to ask. Behind the smile is a real method: leg bands, ear tags, numbered pots, photographs of markings or a barcode on a tube. Some labs avoid names on purpose, and the reason is worth hearing too.
What does your organism do that people refuse to believe when you tell them?
Why ask it
Every specialist carries one of these, and it is often the reason they stayed with the species. Get the evidence along with the fact, meaning how anyone found it out, so you can repeat it with confidence.
How much of what you learn from a mouse, a fly or a plant carries over to people or to other species?
Why ask it
A careful biologist says that some of it carries over and each case has to be tested. Note what they say about the limits, and do not turn anything in the answer into health advice for your report.
If your work involves animals, what is done to keep any harm as small as possible?
Why ask it
Ask it plainly, as a question and not a charge. You are likely to hear about using fewer animals, swapping in cells or computer models where that works, and refining procedures to reduce distress, all under rules that depend on the country and the institution.
Have you ever been bitten, stung, scratched or made ill by something you study?
Why ask it
A reliable crowd-pleaser at a school visit, and botanists and microbiologists have answers too: thorns, sap, allergies. Follow with how they handle the organism now, which turns the story into a lesson about technique.
Is there a species you would love to study but cannot?
Why ask it
The obstacle is the interesting part: it will not live in captivity, it is protected, it lives too long, or nobody will pay for it. Each reason says something about why knowledge of the living world is so uneven from one species to the next.
What happens to the organisms or samples when a study is over?
Why ask it
Samples may go to a freezer, a museum collection or a seed bank, and animals bred for research generally cannot be released. With young children, keep this to plants and samples, since the answer for animals can be upsetting. Older students can ask how those decisions are reviewed.
Surprises
What have you found that was the opposite of what you predicted?
Why ask it
A result that contradicts the prediction is often where a biologist learned the most, so give this one time. What they checked first is the telling detail, because the usual first suspect is a mistake in the method and not a discovery.
What have you seen a living thing do, just once, that you still cannot explain?
Why ask it
Hours of watching turn up things too odd or too rare to publish: a behavior seen a single time, a plant flowering out of season. Find out whether they wrote it down anyway, and whether one sighting can count for anything in science.
Which rule from school biology has the most exceptions in real life?
Why ask it
Candidates include tidy dominant and recessive traits, the definition of a species, and the idea that each organ has one job. If you are a student, ask how they would want it taught, and take the answer back to your teacher as a question, not a correction.
What has changed in biology since you trained that you had to learn from scratch?
Why ask it
Cheap DNA sequencing, gene editing, new imaging and machine learning have each remade parts of the field within a working lifetime. For a career project, the lesson is that the degree is a start and the learning continues after it.
What was your best day at work?
Why ask it
It is often a small, private moment: the first look at something under the microscope, a hatching, a clean result after months of muddle. The day after deserves a follow-up, since it tends to be spent checking whether the result was real.
What is the oddest place your work has taken you?
Why ask it
Field biologists will name a swamp at midnight or a cliff ledge, and lab biologists can match them with a sewage treatment plant, a slaughterhouse or a hospital basement. It is a story question, so use it at a talk when the room has gone quiet.
What worries you about the part of the living world you study, and what gives you hope?
Why ask it
Ask for something from their own records or their own bench, not from the headlines. With younger children, ask only the hope half. With anyone, leave it until late in the conversation, because it changes the mood.
Career
Which degrees do you hold, and which does your present job really require?
Why ask it
The two lists often differ. Requirements depend on the country, the employer and the role, and technicians and field assistants may need less study than someone who leads a research group, so ask how it works where they are.
What does a graduate degree in biology involve day to day, and who pays for it?
Why ask it
A research degree is often one long project with far fewer classes than students picture, while a taught master's can look more like school. Whether a doctoral student is paid a stipend or pays fees differs widely between countries and programs, so get their experience and then check the programs you would apply to.
What was your first paid job in biology, and how did you get it?
Why ask it
First jobs are often humbler than the title on the door now: washing glassware, feeding fish, entering survey sheets, a summer as a field assistant. The second half is the useful one, because it names a way in, such as an advertisement, an email to a professor or a volunteer shift that turned into wages.
How did you pick your specialty, and how late could you still have switched?
Why ask it
Often the honest reply is that a project had an opening or a supervisor was worth following, and the organism came with it. Hearing how late someone changed organism or method is reassuring if you like biology and cannot yet choose between a rainforest and a microscope.
Who pays for your research, and how do you ask them for the money?
Why ask it
The payer may be a government agency, a charity, a company or the institution itself, and each wants something different in return. Two figures make the point: how long the last application took to write, and how many years the money lasts. After that it is clear why writing is a core skill of the job.
Is your position permanent, or tied to a contract or a grant?
Why ask it
Keep this for a career interview and put it gently. Early research posts are fixed-term in many places, and hearing how this person got from one contract to the next is more useful than any general warning about the job market.
Where do biologists you know work, apart from universities?
Why ask it
The list can run to government agencies, hospitals, biotechnology and drug companies, zoos, museums, botanic gardens, conservation groups, farms, food companies, patent offices, classrooms and newsrooms. Ask which of those they would have chosen, and you learn what they value in a job.
Which school subjects besides biology should I take seriously?
Why ask it
Chemistry, statistics, computing and clear writing come up again and again. If they name one you dislike, ask how much of it the job needs and at what level, before you decide the field is closed to you.
What could a high school or college student do this year to get real experience?
Why ask it
Possibilities include volunteering at a nature reserve or an animal shelter, a summer placement in a lab, a science fair project or counting species for a citizen science survey. Whether their own group ever takes students, and how they would want to be approached, turns the advice into an opening.
Can a biologist make a comfortable living where you live, and at what stage of the career?
Why ask it
Nobody has to name their own salary to answer this. Pay varies by country, sector and seniority, so treat what you hear as one person's view and look up current figures from an official source before you put a number in a project.
What would you say to a student who loves animals or the outdoors but is unsure about the science?
Why ask it
A lot of people arrive through a love of wildlife and find the job is mostly patience, data and writing. Expect to hear about neighboring routes too, such as veterinary work, wildlife management, education or science communication, and write those down as alternatives.
Apart from good grades, what makes someone suited to this work?
Why ask it
Patience, steady hands, honest record keeping and the ability to shrug off a wasted month are common answers. Hold the list against yourself, then find out which of the traits they had to learn, which will probably be most of them.
What is the hardest part of the career that has nothing to do with science?
Why ask it
You may hear about moving cities for each new post, long weeks away in a field season, or years of uncertainty before a stable job. This is the answer a career report needs for balance, so thank them for it instead of hurrying on.
Who else should I talk to, and may I mention that you sent me?
Why ask it
A second interview with a different kind of biologist makes a class project much stronger, and an introduction gets an email answered. Leave it until the very end, when they know what you are after and can pick the right person.
Making the most of time with a biologist
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Where you meet them decides what to ask
A class or career interview
Twenty to thirty minutes holds about eight questions once the follow-ups are counted. Take the first two Research questions so you can describe who you interviewed, one each from Lab and Field and Method, and give the remaining time to Career if the assignment is about the job. Put three of your questions in the email that asks for the interview, with the date the project is due, so the biologist can see the level and the deadline at a glance.
A visitor in the classroom
Hand each student one question beforehand, or thirty hands go up for the same one. Organisms and Surprises suit younger classes, and Method earns its place with a class that is about to design its own experiment. Give one student the job of writing down every species name the visitor says, to be looked up afterward.
A lab tour
On a tour the best questions are about things you can point at: the microscope, the incubator, the tank, the door with the warning sign. Most of the Lab and Field group was written for that. Find out from your host beforehand what to wear, because many labs want closed shoes and long hair tied back, and some will hand you a coat.
A field site or a guided walk
Outdoors the biologist is usually working while they talk, so keep each question short and tied to what is in front of you both. The fieldwork, equipment and organism questions fit here, and the career ones can wait for the walk back. Dress as the host tells you to, which at many sites means boots and long sleeves.
One question after a talk
You get one, and the whole room hears the answer. The question about what is still unknown and the one about a prediction that turned out backwards both work with no preparation and reward everyone listening. Leave the career questions for the line at the front afterward.
When there are living things in the room
Hands off until you are invited
Tanks, cages, culture dishes and seedling trays are experiments in progress, and a tap on the glass or a lifted lid can undo weeks of someone's work. Wait to be told where to stand and what you may touch. If you are allergic to animal fur, pollen or latex gloves, tell your host before the day so they can plan around it.
Ask before taking a picture
Animals, unpublished results on a screen and other people's benches may each be off limits, and a flash can disturb animals that are kept on a strict light schedule. A biologist who says yes will often suggest the better shot anyway: the view down the microscope, or the organism next to a ruler for scale.
If something turns your stomach
A dissection tray, a jar of preserved specimens or a room full of insects is ordinary to the person who works there and may not be to you. Say so and step back, and nobody will mind. If what you saw raised a question about how animals are treated, the Organisms group has a way to ask it that will get a full answer.
Get both names of every organism
Most organisms have a common name and a scientific one, and the biologist may use either without noticing. Ask for both and have the scientific name spelled. It is written with the genus capitalized, the species in lower case and both words in italics, and a report that gets this right will be noticed.
Offer a pen
A life cycle, a food web, the layout of an experiment or the family tree of a group of species is easier drawn than said. Hold out a blank page and ask for a sketch with labels. Words you did not know, such as a transect, a knockout or a vector, can go on the same page with their meanings, and the drawing can go into your project with credit.
Questions that tend to go badly
Your own health, or your pet's
A biologist who studies immune cells is not your doctor, and one who studies dog genetics is not your vet. Most will decline to guess at a symptom, and they are right to. Ask how researchers study the condition, and take the personal case to someone who can examine it.
Expecting them to know every living thing
Someone who works on yeast may be no better than you at naming the bird outside the window or the mushroom in your photograph. Ask who would know, or which field guide they would reach for. Do not eat or handle a wild plant or fungus because someone named it in passing.
Opening with a controversy
Animal research, genetic modification and evolution are fair subjects and poor first questions. Raise them once the conversation has warmed up, and ask how the biologist reasons about the issue, which gets a fuller reply than asking which side they are on.
Preparing only for animals
Many biologists work on plants, fungi, microbes, cells in a dish or data sets, with no animal in the building. Check before you go. Most of the Organisms group survives the swap, since a tray of seedlings also has a source, things it needs, a label and a fate when the study ends.
Turning the notes into a report
Tell one study from start to finish
A report that lists five projects in a sentence each reads like a staff page. Choose the study they explained best and follow it through: the question, the organism, the control, what went wrong and what they found. The day at work and the route into the job can sit on either side of it.
Keep their words apart from your reading
Use separate columns or colors in your notes for direct quotes, your own paraphrases and anything you looked up later. A fact from the interview that is going into graded work should be confirmed in a textbook or another reliable source, with both cited.
Treat career details as one person's route
Degrees, funding and pay were described by one biologist, in one country's system, at one point in time. Write them up as how it went for that person, ask what has changed for people starting now, and confirm entry requirements with the schools and employers you would apply to.
Tell them what stuck
Send thanks within a day or two, and name the organism along with one thing about it you had never heard before the interview. If the project turns into a poster, a slideshow or an article, send a photo or a copy. Biologists who visit schools often do it in their own time, and hearing what landed is most of what they get back.