It's official. Two years and over a 100 000
flies later
and I'm a published scientist!
Oh my God, they all popped!
If you've been watching my channel for the last two or so years,
you'll know that I've been doing my PhD in the fly lab
working on flies, but I've not been able to tell
you what exactly I'm working on, beyond
it involves flies and it involves sex and that's because
it's only today
that my paper is published! This is my actual paper.
The paper, which is published
in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is called
''Male relatedness and familiarity are required to modulate male-induced harm to females in Drosophila''
and it is open access
which means that you can read it, the link's all below.
You can read it for yourself, you can tweet about it,
you can blog about it, you can make videos about it, please do.
I want everyone to hear about the trials that I've had to go through over the last two years.
It's like a proper paper with like, figures and everything.
It's got pretty pictures and graphs and more graphs and so much writing.
But if you don't want to read the full paper (but why wouldn't you? Come on! I wrote it
along with... a load of other people, fair)
then the university has put out a press release
that they've titled, I think this is hilarious,
''Family break-ups lead to domestic abuse [violence] in fruit fly relationships.''
And, yeah that is what the paper is about.
It's a tale of sex, and love, and death, and children, and battles and conflicts between males and females,
and conflicts between males and males and I don't know how much more I can sell this to you.
There were trials and tribulations and challenges needed to be overcome,
such as me, like having to count 86 810 dead flies or
having to watch experiments whilst then catching pneumonia in the middle of it.
Oh, yeah! There was a fierce debate between us, the Oxford scientists
and scientists over in Switzerland and we're going backwards and forwards with each other,
like it's a proper story!
It's great! And I cannot wait to share it with you over the next few weeks
So, the paper is about fly sex and sexual selection
and sexual conflict, the battle between the sexes and I've made some videos about that,
I did a whole lecture at the Royal Institution, which is available on YouTube
which you can watch, about sexual conflict.
But it's also about inclusive fitness and relatedness, which is called selfish genes stuff.
And that was pretty much the first ever video I've made on YouTube
was covering that. So you can see that
I've been talking about the ideas on YouTube for a long time.
I just haven't been able to go into the specifics, but
specifically I can now say that I have been bringing in looking at relatedness and looking at
fly sex together to see, okay what happens if the males that are fighting over the female are related
to each other, but not only that but did they, as a family, grow up together or were they separated at birth
and does that affect how they interact with each other.
Because partly it's a ''Are brothers nicer to females when they're brothers?''
but also ''How do brothers know that they're brothers, are they able to tell that they're brothers when
they've been separated at birth and they haven't grown up together?''
So that's kind of what the paper is about.
And the answer, in a word is you need to be both a brother
and you need to have grown up together, in order to stop harming the females as much.
You see, the problem with science is that you really only get the credit once you publish
and if you're the first to publish. Which means that, basically I've not been allowed to talk about my research
until today, until it's published. In case anyone else scoops in there and takes my findings and publishes it
before me. But now, after two years, I can finally talk about it.
And so, over the next few weeks on my channel, I'm gonna be posting, about a video a week,
on all the different aspects of the research.
Some short ones, like on how to sex a fly
'cause lots of people ask me that question, to what it's actually like
day to day, to do a two year long experiment and what is it like to be a researcher,
I took videos all the way though doing the experiment,
about the background theory that my paper fits into and how it adds to what we already know about flies.
If you've got any question about my research, about what it's like to be a PhD student,
anything that you want me to cover in a video, please leave them in the comments below.
Because whilst I've been filming all along throughout the last two years so that you can see what it's actually like
to be a PhD student, not just ''Here is the science,'' but ''This is how you sit down everyday and count 86 810
dead flies.'' Yes, I counted, that's the exact number. But if you've got something else that you want me to cover a
video about, let me know and I can make a video on it because, I mean that's what I'm here for.
This research is founded by the government, thank you, government that's very nice of you,
and so it's part of my duty as a government funded scientist to tell you, the public, about my research.
And also, it's super cool and I haven't been able to talk about it,
so let me know what you want to know about flies, and maybe what you don't want to know about flies
and the things you never thought you wanted to know about flies, but actually do.
I should clarify that this isn't my final Thesis, this isn't the end of my PhD.
This is just one paper, probably about a third of my Theseus overall.
But as scientists, we are judged by our publications. So being a published scientists with now one publication
under my belt is, like really legitimizing as a scientist.
I am officially able to say that I am of a good enough caliber as a science student to be able to publish.
This is what my PhD is training me to do. My PhD trains me to do research of publishable quality
that can go through peer review. And now I've done it! Yes!
So subscribe, click the notifications bell, follow me on Twitter or Reddit or Facebook
or whatever way you want to, to keep your eye on this channel as the videos go up because
I am so excited to finally, finally be able to show you what I've been doing in my PhD over the last two years.