This tiny fruit flies which we often find very annoying, annoyed the USA vice presidential candidate too. Not just these flies but also the people who do research on these flies in Paris, France. As a Biologist doing research in Paris, I thought it is my duty to explain how great we both are, the fruit flies and the researcher in Paris.
First about these Fruit flies, I got personally introduced to them in India by my friend Neha, who is doing her PhD on these flies, I have spent some weekends in her lab, just trying to make these flies mate in with their right partners, for a controlled genetic study. In French there is a saying, “F#@k a fly”, obviously only they know how difficult this job can be. Why then these annoying flies? We have to blame Thomas Hunt Morgan, an American scientist who did some genetics experiments with these flies and proved the mechanism of transferring character from the parents to the offspring through the genes in chromosome. Unfortunately he also got the Nobel Prize for Medicine, just working on these silly fruit flies. From that horrible day, these fruit flies which also share 75% human disease related genes, faithfully living under a controlled matting environment, in the biological labs as a faithful genetics model organism. All this scarifies because of its short life span, which makes it possible to compare the grandmother’s characters to that of the granddaughter’s just in matter of few weeks.
Since The Madam, ‘potential
president of USA’ is not so happy about these flies, maybe we should try to find and alternative, the closest alternative which strikes my mind is the “Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” (Because a Mother-in-law was once a Daughter-in-law too), an Indian TV soap opera family, which is running for past 8 years around . The Protagonist, a melancholic Indian house wife has seen 6 generations along with her grandma, who is potentially 300+ years old. When Protagonist’s husband died in this soap, Indian house wives, who identify themselves with the Protagonist, went on road in protest (I swear this happened!) and got the character back to life! So maybe this family will be an ideal candidate for genetic studies after the fruit flies, Oh! No! Just this very month this soap is also forcefully terminated it seems, hope there is no riots in India right now!
Forget the flies, now it is time to think about the Paris researcher and about their sacrifices. Living one of the world’s most expensive city with a tiny research stipend and with all the worlds sensual pleasures just at your door step, we have to control all our five senses and go to lab and follow the mating of fruit flies and diatoms. Now, who is making a bigger sacrifice, Fruit flies, Paris researchers or the Indian house wives? A very tough question to answer! So let us just say “F#@k a fly” to whoever mock our sacrifices.
