Sometimes surgeons need to remove parts of our bodies to make them healthy, but where do those sections of human go? They can be destroyed, but other times – with the patient’s consent – they are handed over to scientists to see what we can learn from diseased tissues.

Those scientists work in what we call tissue banks, or biobanks, and they are a curious place indeed. As a technician, you never quite know when – or what – is going to arrive in a bucket at the door, but when it does, they must be treated as rare and valuable, because they are.

Removing a tumor, doctors hardly ever get to see could be the pivotal moment that leads to a novel therapy, or even a cure, and we have the donors of these tissues to thank for the opportunity. It’s a rich, varied, and unusual place to work, and as luck would have it IFLScience’s very own custom content manager Dr Beccy Corkill used to work in one. So, we sat her down to find out what it’s really like.

Episode 2 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “What’s It Like Working In A Human Tissue Bank?” – a question taken from issue 21 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if animals have friends, what was the first work of “art”, and we meet author Professor Chris Lintott and read an excerpt from his new book Our Accidental Universe.

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