Nearly Sleepless Fruit Flies

Ever wonder what life would be like if we didn’t need sleep? Well, we might soon find out. Fruit fly fanatics and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have bred genetically modified fruit flies that do not sleep (or need only one hour of sleep a day). The fruit flies certainly got a lot done. However, they died a lot quicker than the sleeping fruit flies. This shows that, like it or not, everybody sleeps for a good reason. Even Sesame Street knew that.

It’s just that we haven’t really found out what that reason is yet.

Why Fruit Flies?

Fruit files and blowflies have long been used a lab animals. Coincidentally, in the mid 1960s, my own Mom worked as the secretary for the leading blow fly researcher in the world at the University of Pennsylvania. She even received an autographed book by him — which no one in the family can comprehend. We do know that he was the guy who managed to breed a strain of blowflies that would keep on eating until they exploded. I think that was around the time when Mom decided that she really needed another job.

It is yet unknown if people carry the “sleepless” gene or the “eat you explode” gene, but considering that we share a lot of DNA with a lot of other critters, chances are pretty high that we do.

Why Do We Sleep?

One of the reasons the sleepless fruit flies were developed was to one day get a decent answer to that question. We spend about a third of our lives sleeping. Many people feel that this is time that could be used more productively. They get a bit stressed out over how much time they sleep and see how little they can get by on, so they work more.

You shouldn’t view sleep as a waste of time. It clearly is productive time — only we might not be conscious of all the good seven or eight hours of sleep a night gives you. Although we don’t know why we sleep, we do know what happens when we don’t get enough sleep — our world turns upside down. We can’t perceive what is happening, we can’t think straight and we certainly get very sick.

Although it seem like a large chunk of our lives is doing nothing, clearly our bodies are doing something critical. Never feel guilty about needing your sleep. That’s like feeling guilty about needing to breathe in and out all of the time.