As The Beatles famously sang: “I get by with a little help from my friends.” And the saying is just as true in life as it is in science. In fact, in this week’s episode, both of our storytellers show just how much they needed the help of their friends to succeed at science.

Part 1: Months into her fly experiment Michaela Agapiou still can’t catch flies efficiently and now she’s faced with the challenge of scaling up her experiment.

Michaela Agapiou is a research scientist and storyteller living in London. Nowadays Michaela’s research is all computer based but she carries around a glow in the dark sperm cell keyring to remind her of her lab work days.

Part 2: In order to get a good grade in her biology class, Ashley McKelvy designs her own experiment that requires her friends to drink a cup of coffee every 20 minutes.

Ashley McKelvy has lived in Arkansas, Florida, Texas and currently lives in Georgia. She is a former runner who has traded her sneakers in for cycling cleats, and she loves nerding out over her last workout. She has worked as an English teacher, a librarian, a grader of standardized tests, and she once had a career at Old Navy that lasted three hours.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

So, my least favorite lab experiment in my undergraduate when I was doing biochem way back in 2012, was when we had to sort out male and female fruit flies and work out how many had red eyes or white eyes or one type of wing or another type of wing, and it was so boring. I hated it because I was rubbish at it.

And, also, I really hate being that person, but I was like, “When am I ever going to need to know how to do this?”

I wanted to be a molecular biologist. I wanted to know how they had red eyes or white eyes, not observe and count how many do.

Lo and behold, four years later, I signed myself up to do a PhD at the University of Leeds, where I'd be studying how a protein has a role in sperm cell development in fruit flies, but it was still firmly going to be a Molecular Biology PhD. I was studying not just this protein, but one form of this protein that existed in about 8 to 10 cells of the fruit fly testis. So, really, nice and particular and niche.

For this project, I was going to be split between two different lab spaces. The first was a standard molecular biology lab with lab coats and gloves, pipettes, PCR machines, endless jars of colorless liquids. This was the equivalent of my work safe space. I felt comfortable here, I felt familiar here, I felt confident and excited.

I decided when I was 15 I wanted to be a scientist. All my training had been leading up to me doing this project in this lab space.

The other lab was the fly lab, and that was way less familiar. At every workstation, there's a microscope. There's a jar with paint brushes, dissecting tools and pens. And there's also these really gross flasks of ethanol where all the discarded flies get thrown into. It was super gross.

We also didn't have to wear gloves in there, which was super weird. How can it be a lab without the gloves?

But this lab space was my co‑supervisor Amanda’s. Her and her fly team helped get me set up and started and showed me the ropes of looking after flies.

They were interested in fly mating experiments and told me their little tricks, like we store the flies in these plastic vials with their food at the bottom, which is normally smooth. But if you scratch a little bit into the top of it, it encourages the flies to lay eggs there, so you get more flies. Excellent.

Michaela Agapiou shares her story at Imperial College London in London, UK in February, 2024. Photo by Daniela Duhur.

Pretty quickly into my PhD, I realized I was I was actually going to be spending more time in the fly lab than I was in the molecular lab, because flies are really, really small, particularly fruit flies. I had to dissect so many flies to be able to get enough samples to even do anything in the molecular lab.

So I had this kind of FOMO of missing out on things in the main molecular lab. I particularly missed Katerina, who was a PhD student who started at the same time as me in my main group. We kind of had each other to muddle through all the new things we were figuring out.

Whereas in the fly lab, Amanda’s team, they’d already been there for at least a year or so before me. Some of them had been there for three years. They all seemed super competent, but also really close. They had a bond I just didn’t feel like I was a part of. I kind of expected that at the beginning but I didn’t really feel like I was progressing.

If you came into the fly lab at any given time, it would kind of look like I was doing the same kind of thing as Amanda's team. I would be there sorting flies, counting flies. I could now tell the difference between male and female flies. Combining different genetically‑modified flies together.

But, actually, our interests were really different and the type of experiments we did were really different. So, I kind of felt a bit different and a bit of an outsider there.

The other thing was I was also trying to hide the things I was worried about, like not being able to do from them, because I was used to being a competent, confident lab person, and, here, that was not happening. I think it took four months until, one day, I looked down the microscope and instead of the two overlapping fields of view I’d been seeing, it was finally one circle like it had supposed to have been the whole time.

And I was just like, “Oh, my God, this is going to make my life so much easier. But also, why has it taken so long for me to be able to do this? This is ridiculous. And why can't I pooter?”

Pootering is when you have this long plastic tube and you suck up a fly into the tube. It's a long tube for a reason. You're not going to eat the fly, don't worry. And then you move the tube into a new vial and blow out the tube and put the fly in there. It sounds pretty simple. You just suck up and then you blow it out. It's all fine, but I could not get the hang of it at all.

I found it a really awkward, embarrassing thing to practice in the lab, like blowing in and out of this tube. It's like plastic and feels gross and you get a bit of like kind of taste. I think I can taste the yeast food that they eat and it's gross. I don't know if that's in my head or not, so, I just stop trying to practice that.

It's also stressful because you’re trying to not release genetically‑modified flies out into the wild. So I stop doing that and I just use CO2, which is another way you can knock out a fly and then they're much more easier to move about.

And I could get away with this, I could hide this because the real fly people, they use CO2 as well. But they cared for their fly mating experiments about the whole fly and being gentle to the fly, so in those cases, they had to pooter, whereas I was just going to dissect and tear up my fly anyway so I can just use the CO2.

Now, while I was there just caring about my protein and not really caring about fly mating, Amanda, my supervisor didn't really get why I just cared about this protein when I didn't know what was going on with the mating. She would kind of bring this up in my monthly supervisor meetings every now and then. It was kind of annoying, especially when I had this fun list of all these other experiments to do.

So for a solid year, I managed to avoid doing any behavioral experiments but, eventually, she wore us down and got us to agree that I should do something called a sperm competition assay.

I came away from that meeting a bit annoyed about all the said fun experiments I'd have to delay. I came with a list of papers. Respect for Amanda’s persistence over the year got me to do this experiment, and it's kind of a little bit of fear that I just wasn’t enough of a fly person to do this experiment well.

I had a trip down to London to visit my family that weekend. I take the papers with me. Trains are a great place to read papers. Thankfully, the word ‘sperm competition’ encouraged the man on the seat next to me to move, so I had two hours of two seats to myself, which is ideal. I got cozy and so I read the papers.

It was surprisingly interesting. It turns out a lot of insects, including fruit flies, when they mate twice, they're more likely to offspring from the second mating than the first, which was counterintuitive to me and a fun fact I didn’t know. Through this competition experiment, you could learn about sperm offense and sperm defense properties of a fly, which, despite having studied sperm cells a lot, they're not terms I’ve heard of. So, I kind of got into the idea of doing this experiment and came up with a plan.

It takes a month or so to actually grow the flies, get everything ready. I do that. And it's experiment day and I'm kind of excited.

I get into the fly room, which is 25 degrees Celsius and 50% humidity, which sounds like an ideal climate for me, but it's also really smelly because of the said yeast. I have to set up 160 pairs of flies as quickly as possible and I'm really regretting that I never learned how to pooter last year. Instead, I'm using my favorite red paintbrush and trying to pick up the flies and transfer them to a new vial as quickly as possible without them flying away or squashing them. I end up squashing quite a few.

Michaela in the lab. Photo by Mark Webster.

Growing lots and lots of flies in bottles to try to have them all at the same age.

The stacks of vials with food that we use to grow smaller batches of flies in or do the mating experiments.

I'm very annoyed at myself because more flies are dying than necessary. And while I have dissected tens of thousands of flies for my PhD, I do still care about trying to minimize their death.

I'm also annoyed at myself because I just let this embarrassment stop me from learning a thing, especially when I was new. No one would have cared, I now realize. But now, now 12 months in, I really look like an idiot that I can't do this thing, so the embarrassment is ten times worse.

I get on with the experiment the next day or so. At the end of the two days, I have half as much data as I wanted, partly from the squishing but also because one of my genetically‑modified flies is not very attractive, it turns out. Which is interesting but not what I had accounted for. They all look the same to me.

So I sit down with Amanda and I'm like, “Ugh, I'm annoyed. I actually care about this experiment. You got me excited about this experiment. It's your fault.” No.

And we sit down, run the numbers and I need to scale up to 800 pairs to get enough data in one day. This means I'm going to need help. And what that really means for me is that I have to tell the fly team that I can't pooter.

Another couple of months of prep and experiment day rolls around once again. I've got my spare set of clothes, because they're going to smell at the end of this. I have my vials and vials and vials of flies. I have Amanda and her trio, all with a pooter around their neck. And then I've got my favorite, silly, red paintbrush and I go through the layout for the day, what vials we're responsible for. I kind of skim over the “I can’t pooter and I'm going to use this paintbrush” thing.

Then Lauren, another PhD student goes, “Whoa, Michaela, you can't pooter?”

I'm like, “No, but I got my paintbrush. It's all good.”

And she's like, “Well, we'll just do the pootering. Don't worry about it.”

And I'm like, “No, no, no, it's my stupid experiments, it's my stupid flies that won't mate. I've got to do my bit. You're all helping me out and I really appreciate it.”

And she's like, “No, Michaela, it'll be much faster if we pooter. It really doesn't matter. Just keep giving us the vials of flies and get everything set up.”

All that embarrassment and shame I'd been holding on to, well, maybe not all of it, but most of it gets replaced by relief and real gratitude for her true lack of judgement. And then there's like a little bit of shame that’s like a shame that I was ashamed.

But, anyways, we have a frantic half‑an‑hour or so, which is about as long as it took me to do the 160 on my own, and now we're doing 800 together. Passing around vials, getting everything set up, all in sync and chaos in this tiny, little, smelly room.

Everything is ready and we're all facing this wall where there's all these vials and vials of flies, each in their individual little pairs. We're scanning them to see if any of them are mating, ready with our pens to take them off if they are.

And Amanda just goes, “So, what’s the latest gossip?” And I know I'm part of the team.

Thanks.

Part 2

So, freshman year of college, I am sitting in my Honors Biology classroom with a huge case of imposter syndrome, because I was a pretty good student generally in high school but I had a very colorful science education background.

One of my professors was known for telling a group of students one time that he owned a pair of anti‑gravity boots and that he had once startled a janitor after classes because he was levitating in the classroom.

Ashley McKelvy shares her story in Atlanta, GA at Waller’s Coffee Shop in March 2024. Photo by Rob Felt.

And the students were like, “Really? So, can we see?”

And he said, “Oh, no,” and he immediately just points to the window. He's like, “It's raining outside, my ankles are swollen, they won't fit.”

And that could have just been a weird thing he said, but he just wouldn't back down from things like that. He once told a story about an experiment he had done on the weekend and it had gone wrong somehow and he was shooting fireballs down the hallway. We were just like…

I mean, I think that my science background is basically riddled with science fiction and so I always felt a little nervous about my ability in a science classroom.

So I'm sitting in this biology class and I'm not 100% sure whether or not a man can levitate, but I know that I don't belong in this classroom. And so I'm ready for this class to be kind of a struggle. It turns out it's going to be a struggle for everybody.

For some reason, I have been a teacher since the time that I was in this classroom and I think that the professor just had a hard time figuring out where we were at academically. And so she came at us with some really intense hardcore science for the first couple of weeks. I was just like, well, obviously, I don't know what's going on because I'm very bad at this. But then I was talking to other people and they were like, “No, none of us know what is happening right now.”

She must have figured out that she was way over our heads, so she decided to dial it back down. We came in one day and she had a hands‑on activity meant to guide us through the scientific method.

And I was like, “Okay, I know I'm bad at this, but I was a latchkey kid with access to Nickelodeon so I watched a lot of Mr. Wizard when I was growing up. I was taught science by a nice man who did science experiments with neighborhood kids in his kitchen on TV for me. I've met the scientific method, not here.”

So I start to panic because if I don't know what is expected of me then I don't know how to get good grades. And getting good grades is basically my whole identity at that time in my life. And not only that, but I'm in college on a pretty big scholarship and I don't want to screw that up. So, I know that I need to do something.

For this class, we have to write a paper. I feel pretty confident in my ability to write a paper, but I need something more. And so I decide that I'm going to design my own experiment.

I was writing a paper about caffeine, and at the time, there were two facts that stuck out to me in my research. One, was that a six‑ounce cup of coffee contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine. And, two, was that it takes about 20 minutes for your system to fully metabolize caffeine.

So I decide to get a bunch of my friends together. I get 10 friends who agree to come to my dorm room on a Saturday afternoon and we are going to drink a six‑ounce cup of coffee every 20 minutes for two hours.

I've decided to make it scientific, so every 20 minutes we write down how we're feeling and we sign our names, because I thought maybe our signatures would change as we got more caffeinated. I don't know.

So we all do it. We get together in my tiny, little, cinder block dorm room. We got two pots of coffee going. We've got some six‑ounce cups of coffee and we just proceed to drink coffee every 20 minutes.

The first hour is fine because we're college kids and it's coffee. We're used to this sort of thing. It's not a big deal. But after the fourth cup, my friend Paul came to me and he just said, “I have to stop. I have to stop because if I keep doing this, I'm going to get very angry.”

I was like, “Okay. Yeah, thank you for your service. Fill out your questionnaire. And no problem. You're free to go.”

So he left and the rest of us persisted.

We drank the fifth cup of coffee and it starts to not taste good anymore. It starts to feel really kind of acidic in your stomach. And then we drink our sixth cup of coffee and we fill out our papers and sign our names, and then, immediately, everybody just runs out of my dorm room where we've been sitting for two hours to do whatever they feel instinctively they need to do to take care of their body.

A bunch of people immediately go outside and start smoking. I go outside and join the smokers, not because I'm a smoker but because I need to talk at people really fast and probably too loud for, like, a long time. I'm pacing back and forth until the edge wears off a little bit and I start to calm down enough that I decided to go up to the second floor of my dorm and check on my friend Moe.

Moe is laying flat in bed with the lights off, and she said, “I've ordered pizza. I have to eat. I feel terrible.”

And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I feel pretty bad too.” I was like, “Food actually sounds like a good idea.”

I ate some food. I kind of absorbed the coffee a little bit. And we're all teenagers, basically, so after a couple of bad hours, we all get a good night sleep and we're fine the next day.

I write my paper and I hand it in. Two weeks later, my professor was handing papers back out and she said, “Hey, I left your paper in my office. Can you come to my office hours and get it?”

And I said, “Sure, yeah. No problem.”

I was feeling pretty confident that I had done enough to show initiative and stand out that I did not think I could possibly be in trouble.

So I went to office hours and she sat me down and she said, “Just so you know, when you do experiments on human beings, there is a process. So, like, submit it for review and people have to examine it for ethical implications and sign off on it.”

And I was like, “Yeah. Yeah, that is… that makes sense.” I was a little sheepish because we obviously both knew I did not do that.

But then she handed me my paper and I sort of did the mental math. I'm very good at math. I did the mental math and was like, “Okay, I'm going to make a B in this class. That is going to be fine. I'm going to happily take it. I'm going to take Intro to Geology and satisfy my science requirements and I am moving on.”

But it's kind of funny the things that you learn in college. There's the academic things you learn. There are the interesting facts you learn along the way about, like, ethical reporting in science experiments. And then there are just these other things that you learn.

And what I learned from doing that experiment is basically nothing about coffee. What I learned is that I had 10 friends who were willing to low‑level poison themselves just because I asked and because they cared about me and they wanted to help me out.

Thanks.