Article published in The Atlantic
Modern genetics would not be possible without the humble fruit fly.
In college, I worked briefly in a fruit-fly lab, where I spent most of my time just keeping different fly strains alive. It was not difficult—as anyone with a fruit-fly infestation can tell you—but the repetitive work imprinted itself on my brain. Even today, the way my slightly chubby white cat scrunches when he walks resembles nothing more to me than a third instar fly larva, swollen and ready to metamorphose.
This is to say that I came to First in Fly, a new book about fruit-fly research, with perhaps some special interest. In fact, a popular appreciation of fruit flies has seemed long overdue to me. No single animal has contributed as much to the field of genetics as the ordinary and ubiquitous Drosophila melanogaster.
These tiny, winged, exoskeleton-ed creatures—so different from us in appearance—have led to research illuminating a surprising amount about the human body: The genes that tell a fruit fly where to sprout its legs are quite similar to the ones that tell our bodies where to sprout limbs. As are the genes that form the pattern of fine hairs on a fly’s wing and the ones that orientate the tiny hairs in our ears. As are the genes that govern a fruit fly’s circadian rhythm and the ones that give us jet lag. And so on. Research into Drosophila has resulted in at least five Nobel Prizes.
First in Fly by Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr is a thorough chronicle of the contributions of these creatures to science over the past century. Mohr herself is a fly scientist at Harvard Medical School, and she knows intimately the life of a “fly pusher.” (The name comes from the act of pushing flies around under a microscope.) She can at times drift too far into molecular biology for a lay reader, but her book is at its best when it conveys both the ingenuity and sheer labor necessary to coax biological secrets out of Drosophila. If you’ve ever looked at a fly and wondered what it could possibly tell you about the workings of the human body, well, it’s not easy for scientists either.... Read more about "Consider the Fruit Fly"
