Flies: An Introduction

I was coming up on a deadline that I never anticipated. It was one that required me to either quit my job (leaving me with no income to provide for my children and wife), or quit pursuing my degree (which I had relentlessly been working on for years at this point).

For the past few years I've been working sometimes up to 80 hours per week, in addition to full-time school. As a firefighter/paramedic you're required to work 24 hour shifts. It's a perpetual rotation of 24 hours on, 48 hours off. This makes it nearly impossible to do anything that happens on a regularly scheduled basis. I had been making this work by making shift trades or burning vacation time that I've been banking for the last few years. The problem was that I started to run out of vacation hours. I was set to have zero hours about a month shy of the semester ending. To complicate this further, I couldn't just look for another job in my field, because all of the schedules were similar.

As a father I knew the choice I must make, but I didn't like it at all. I had been crushing it in school. In addition to getting great grades I felt the need to become part of the campus community by participating in lots of extracurricular activities. I've been doing everything from teaching human anatomy in the cadaver lab outreach program to biomedical research. (Even a little blockchain related research in there sometimes!) This whole life as an academic/scientist that I was trying to build was about to be crushed.

Then it came on my radar that the National Science Foundation funds undergraduate research programs at various colleges across the country. The programs consist of a multitudes of topics at select institutions and they pay a livable stipend. (This is a must if I'm going to keep up with paying my mortgage.) Sounds great, but the programs are extremely competitive. One college may accept 8-10 students of the 1,000 or more that may apply. Surely my chances were slim, but the desperation of the approaching deadline loomed over my shoulder. It's really hard to make time to build a comprehensive application and personal essay catered to each program. I ended applying to around 7.

Then I waited. For weeks I heard nothing but crickets. I obsessively checked my email praying for something to arise. There was nothing. One day I was checking the email for probably the 50th time, and decided to check the junk folder. There it was. I had an email stating that I wasn't able to be given a "first offer" but if I was still interested I could be placed on a waitlist. The only catch was that I had to answer the email immediately. The email was a week old.

I hurriedly wrote an apologetic reply expressing gratitude and explaining the junk folder situation, but I felt crushed. How could I not check the junk folder? Of course it would go in the junk folder. My email has an overly aggressive spam filter. Even in the off chance that it was alright that I didn't reply right away, I had to depend on someone either not answering or turning down their offer to be a summer intern. The percent chance was non-zero, but not looking good.

Two weeks later, I received a text. "Make sure to check your email. I don't want this to go to your junk folder." In the NFL, the last man to be drafted as a player is labeled "Mr. Irrelevant." I had just become the Mr. Irrelevant for a prestigious biology program. I'm not going to lie, I teared up a little bit. This is not the usual for me, but the lifting of the weight of my deadline and my journey for self-actualization wrought with a rocky path felt validated. I was relieved.

What would I be studying though? Well, flies. Drosophila melanogaster to be specific. I had previously studied animal behavior (ethology) and examined animals further through experimentation in evolutionary neurobiology. Arthropods (insects) weren't necessarily my favorite. (Although, I much prefer them over nematoda or "roundworms"). I see the importance of finding the biological basis of behavior in high throughput models. Fruit flies are great for this due to their short life cycle. That's about the extent of my knowledge other than a few popular and easily replicable experiments.

I'm going to be doing a lot of reading in the coming weeks in an attempt to learn the ins and outs of the organism. The program starts in June. I figured I should keep notes and interesting things I pick up to consolidate the information in my mind. What better place to share this than with my friends on Hive in the science community? I'm hoping that I can find some engaging stuff to share with you all!

What are your experiences with drosophila?

I wanted to have something to explain, "why is he writing about flies?" My typical field of study is in computer science and neuroscience. This one definitely seems like it is coming out of left field.

In the minds of many it seems like such a weird choice for study. It isn't exactly chosen by me per se but in my early literature review, there seems to be quite a few interesting highlights in this model organism.

A lot of what I've studied so far has pertained to medicine. I really like translational/clinical research. There are so many basic science questions left to answer in neuroscience though. Sometimes finding the basis of behavior seems more like magic than science. It's a weird place.

What do you study?