A passion for fruit flies
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What use to science is a pesky organism that feeds on rotting fruit? Professor Bambos Kyriacou has spent fifty years observing the behaviour of fruit flies. He keeps them in the lab and in his garden in their thousands, has recorded fruit fly courtship songs using a microphone loved by Jonny Carson (because it made his voice sound deeper) and invented equipment to keep track of their sleeping patterns. He tells Jim Al-Khalili how fruit flies sparked his interest in genetics and how experiments with insomniac fruit flies opened our eyes to the fundamental importance of body clocks.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich? |
| 0:05.5 | Our podcast Good Bad Billionaire takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how they made their money. |
| 0:11.9 | And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy. |
| 0:15.5 | So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad guy as she claims, |
| 0:19.2 | or what Jeff Bezos really did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars, |
| 0:24.6 | listen to Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack, and me, Zingsing. |
| 0:28.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.4 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:35.7 | Hello, welcome to the Life Scientific, the show where I get to talk to some of our leading scientists, |
| 0:41.1 | and you get to find out what gets them out of bed in the morning. |
| 0:44.2 | Today I'm talking to a man with a passion for fruit flies. |
| 0:47.5 | He tells me why they're what's known as a model organism, |
| 0:50.4 | loved by geneticists for decades, |
| 0:52.7 | and how this pesky creature opened our eyes to the fundamental importance of body clocks. |
| 0:58.0 | As anyone who suffered from jet lag will know, |
| 1:00.1 | our body clocks tick away no matter what. |
| 1:03.4 | If they say it's time to be awake, then awake will be, |
| 1:06.7 | even if it's the middle of the night. |
| 1:08.5 | And as we now know, they have a firm hold over our ability to function at different times of day. |
| 1:14.7 | It's only quite recently, however, that we've understood how these body clocks work. |
| 1:19.6 | Thanks in part to the work of our guest on the Life Scientific today, |
| 1:22.8 | Chara Lambos, known to many as Bambos Kiriaku. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.