Professor Luke O'Neill

And please do tune into my podcast available every Thursday.

It's a News Talk production wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, Luke O'Neill here and welcome to Show Me the Science, my weekly podcast.

And I try to pick stuff that interests me and hopefully will interest you.

And there's sometimes an immunology twist because I'm an immunologist.

And this week, there's a great one if you're an immunologist because it's all about the science of siblings and does where you come in the family affect your future prospects?

And guess what?

It might be tied to infections is what they found in this really interesting study.

Now, of course, we're all fascinated by this.

Like if you're the eldest or the youngest or in the middle or if you're an only child and what you might end up doing for a career or maybe your personality.

And of course, there's all this bickering between siblings, although we love each other really, don't we?

But it's really interesting statistically because it's possible to look at this question.

And the scientific question we're asking is, does where you come in the family matter?

The birth order, we call this, whether you're eldest or youngest or whatever it is.

And it's easy to look at in a way because you can say, OK, let's take a middle child.

What are the chances of that middle child becoming, say, a politician or whatever?

And they sometimes look at professions differently.

They look at personality type as well, like is the eldest going to be more dominant or whatever it is.

And then you can look at millions of people and then come to an average.

Now, again, importantly, there's no hard and fast rules here.