Meet the scientists!

Normally, if one of the trillions of cells that make up the human body goes wrong in some way, for example if it picks up harmful mutations, it will activate a ‘suicide’ program and die, to protect the rest of the body. But this death program (which scientists call ‘apoptosis’) doesn’t always work as it should: cancer cells manage to evade death and start growing out of control, while on the other hand in neurodegenerative diseases, cells die when they shouldn’t. So it’s very important to understand more about how apoptosis normally works, and that’s what my research is focussed on. The ultimate aim is to figure out what goes wrong with the  suicide program in diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration, and to put it right!

Most of my research is actually done on an organism called Drosophila melanogaster, or the fruit fly – if you have a composter at home you’ll have seen these little flies swarming out of it when you take the lid off. Fruit flies are great to work with for several reasons:

• scientists have been using them for almost 100 years now, so loads of clever and extremely useful genetic techniques have been developed to make them a very powerful research tool 
• fruit flies are ‘simplified’ humans… OK so humans don’t have 6 legs and a pair of wings, but pretty much all the basic processes of molecular biology are the same in flies and in humans, though they tend to be a bit less complex (and therefore easier to understand) in flies. So understanding fly biology is a great starting point for understanding human biology
• fruit flies are cheap and easy to maintain

Most of my days start with turning on my computer and checking my e-mail, followed by collecting virgin female flies to set up new fly crosses. After that my day can vary a lot, but it usually involves some or all of these things: doing experiments, analysing data, going to meetings and seminars, reading (to make sure that I’m up to date with the latest research in my field), planning future experiments, trying to figure out why past experiments didn’t work, maintaining my fly stocks, maintaining my cells, preparing presentations… Oh, and at lunchtime I almost always go up to the canteen with the other scientists in my lab for food and a chat – a very important part of the day!

I’d love to have some equipment so that when I go to schools to give talks about my work, I could give the students a chance to do something hands-on. I’d have to think carefully about exactly what to buy so that it’s safe and fun.