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home in New 7*aland.In order to do that I aimed to get a senior registrar / clinical lecturer
post at a centre of excellence which for me, working in London at time, was the Royal
Brompton Hospital. I decided that research would definitely be a pre-requisite to this
appointment and so successfully obtained a research fellow job at the same hospital'
However, having started down a research path, I can no longer envisage not having research
as a major part of my role. Research involves the development of different skills to those
required in clinical medicine. At the time, I enjoyed considering in depth and reading widely
around one aspect of medicine. But, when I was asked by one scientist whether I used
,positive, or .negative' pipetting when I did enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAS)
studies, I knew that I was in a different world. It teaches you attention to detail' the need to be
very methodical, the need to be sceptical and the need to question every factor' It also allows
an opportunity to work with people who are experts in different areas. From the scientists I
learnt patience, information technology skills, statistics and careful laboratory bench-work' I
also appreciated the very different knowledge and skills that Carolyn Busst as a medical and
electrical engineer brought to the research. The topics of research and critical reviews were
not previously emphasised but now occupy a central theme in current medical school training'
and I consider this important in developing questioning practitioners'
Of course, now I would do everything very differently. One problem with research' as the
quotation above suggests, is that no matter what topic you start with, it can expand
exponentially. If commencing this research now, I would restrict the work to investigating
exhaled NO and the long-actingp2 agonist ('salmeterol') trial that I was also conducting
during this time. In addition,I was undertaking clinical training with on-call commitment in a
paediatric cardiorespiratory intensive care setting' I would not' for example' have also
embarked on learning induced sputum techniques and ELISAs for processing IL8 and TNFg'
This latter research ultimately suffered for which I feel responsible. From the beginning I
found the children, particularly healthy controls, did not like the use of hypertonic saline for
sputum induction. This needed much greater attention and a full time researcher on this alone
to determine a satisfactory technique. However, by this time I had established the machines'
connections and protocols and was running with the exhaled NO research, and I was enjoying
it. Also, in comparison, the adult respiratory service had four research fellows dedicated to
investigating these areas of medicine which was a great deal more realistic. On the other hand,
I would now also make the most of any overlappin g area of research to combine
investigations. For example, at the time I was the principal investigator in a cross-over trial
involving two dosage regimes of salmeterol compared to one dosage regime of salbutamol
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