"Science is the refuge of the mediocre": Steve Jones on "The Life Scientific"

My friend Steve Jones (real name John Stephen Jones), geneticist and popular writer, appeared this morning on the BBC Radio 4′s regular program, “The Life Scientific.” You can either download or listen to the half-hour show here (click “play recent episodes”). 

Steve is quite eloquent, as always, covering topics ranging from his own upbringing, his experiments on flies and snails, his role as a popularizer of science, and where the media fails in covering science.

I was interviewed about Steve for this BBC show some months ago, and they’ve used two snippets of my own recollections, especially describing the experiments Steve and I did with others in Death Valley studying how far fruit flies can fly in the desert, and a really beautiful (and largely neglected) experiment we did with Linda Partridge using mutant flies with temperature-sensitive eye colors as a way to determine what climates flies actually experience in the wild (references and links at bottom).

Steve was elected to the Royal Society in April, so at last he can (but won’t) append the vaunted “FRS” to his name.

Steve and I at the Hay Literary Festival, June 2010

h/t: Several British readers

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Coyne, J. A., I. A. Boussy, T. Prout, S. H. Bryant, J. S. Jones, and J. A. Moore. 1982. Long-distance migration of Drosophila. Am. Nat. 119:589-595.

Jones, J. S., J. A. Coyne, and L. Partridge. 1987. Estimation of the thermal niche of Drosophila melanogaster using a temperature-sensitive mutation. Am. Nat. 130:83-90.