Anne Weston

Anne Weston works as an electron microscopist for Cancer Research UK in London. Her image comes from a project she was working on with John Marshall, one of the charity's scientists.

She explains the technique she used: "It is a scanning electron micrograph and it was a sample of cancer cells that we 'freeze-fractured' purely by throwing into liquid nitrogen. This one just happened to fracture with the nucleus still intact but the rest of the cell missing so the nucleus sticks out."

This project is still ongoing but Anne also works with a variety of other research groups, using techniques such as transmission electron microscopy and cryo-electron microscopy.

"We are a service unit so we provide a service to the whole of Cancer Research UK. We have a number of projects going at any one time," Anne says.

She first started using electron microscopes while studying for her degree in zoology. Because of this experience with the equipment, on her graduation she secured a job at St Thomas' Hospital's ophthalmology department and then moved on to join Cancer Research UK.

Anne was originally based in a department where she worked solely on eyes. But she says that "where I work now it can be just about anything. It can be tissue, it can be cells, it can come from anywhere."

In addition to taking the pictures, Anne also colours many of them herself. However, it is the preparation of the samples and then the capturing of images that she enjoys the most.

"I think I enjoy taking the pictures more because you never know what you are going to find. But I enjoy colouring the pictures as well. It's like going back to being a child colouring in something," she adds.