Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn why it might actually be a good thing that doctors work such long hours.

You'll also learn about fruit fly research with Stephanie Moore, a lecturer

on genetics at Harvard Medical School in the first edition of our four-part Fruit Fly Friday

mini series. Let's set us some curiosity. There's a good reason why doctors

have very long shifts and when I say long shifts I am not kidding. On average

US doctors work almost 60 hours a week, and a lot of the time, younger residents

work up to 80 hours and have to deal with grueling 24-hour shifts.

We wanted to cover the research behind this today because at first glance

those long hours might seem like a disaster waiting to happen. I mean delivering

medical care is stressful, highly demanding work and doing it on little sleep seems like it would result in people

getting hurt. But there is a convincing reason why doctors prefer to keep working instead

of handing their patients off to another doctor. And that reason is that it can save lives.

This is relieved to me because when I moved to Chicago I live with my good friend Blake and he was a medical school

the first three years we lived together and yeah his hours brutal I've never understood why

they did this and I'm so happy to know now well yeah clearly saving lives is a

pretty good reason and this is backed up by a lot of research that has shown that even when training shifts

and weekly scheduled hours for doctors are cut back, there haven't been significant changes

in the number of lives saved.

So what gives? One of the major reasons for this is the risk that goes

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