A short biography of a creature that changed science. There's a buzz in the air, the sound of a billion wings vibrating to the tune of scientific success. For generations, the fruit fly has been defining biology's major landmarks. From genetics to development, behavior to aging, and evolution to the origin of the species, it has been a key and, outside academic circles, an unaccredited player in some of the twentieth century's greatest biological discoveries. In fact, everything from gene therapy to cloning and the Human Genome Project is built on the foundation of fruit fly research. This witty, irreverent biography of the fruit fly provides a broad introduction to biology as well as a glimpse into how one short life has informed scientific views on such things as fundamentals of heredity, battle of the sexes, and memory. “Brookes writes with humor and economy. He places the unsung fruit fly into the much broader and immediate history of the rapidly advancing field of biology and genetics.” - Publishers Weekly A short biography of a creature that changed science. There's a buzz in the air, the sound of a billion wings vibrating to the tune of scientific success. For generations, the fruit fly has been defining biology's major landmarks. From genetics to development, behavior to aging, and evolution to the origin of the species, it has been a key and, outside academic circles, an unaccredited player in some of the twentieth century's greatest biological discoveries. In fact, everything from gene therapy to cloning and the Human Genome Project is built on the foundation of fruit fly research. This witty, irreverent biography of the fruit fly provides a broad introduction to biology as well as a glimpse into how one short life has informed scientific views on such things as fundamentals of heredity, battle of the sexes, and memory. Martin Brookes has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and spent eight years in biological research. He hates flies. Fly The Unsung Hero of Twentieth-Century Science By Brookes, Martin Ecco Copyright © 2004 Martin Brookes All right reserved. ISBN: 0060936797 Chapter One The Fly Who Came in from the Cold Inside the cage, John and Yoko were going through the mating ritual. John was the more active of the two, vibrating various bits of his anatomy at physically implausible speeds, while Yoko looked on impassively. Peering through the Plexiglas walls, we whispered laddish encouragement, urging John to make his move. When eventually he did, climbing on top of his partner from the rear, the studious silence of the genetics class was interrupted by our loud chorus of orgasmic cheers. I spent most of that afternoon with two university friends creating daft nicknames for our captive fruit flies and paying little attention to the science. John and Yoko, Sid and Nancy, and Charles and Di seemed preferable to the dry and prosaic Drosophila melanogaster. Dozens of star-studded couples passed under our impatient adolescent gaze. Sometimes the flies would sit motionless at opposite ends of their enclosure. Bored and frustrated, we would flick at their cages, willing them into doing something worth watching. It was difficult to take the fruit fly seriously. Like all insects, it had a head, a thorax, an abdomen, and six delicate legs. It also had wings; two of them. But with all this presented in a body less than half the size of a grape seed, here was an animal crying out to be ignored. You could squash a hundred of them without noticing, and I did. On my own, purely subjective, scale of animal aesthetics, the fruit fly ranked pretty low; respectably higher than the flatworm, but some way below the dog whelk. Even among its evolutionary relatives, the fruit fly hardly seemed to stand out. It lacked the ghoulish charm of distant cousins like screwworm flies, which laid their eggs in the genitals, mouth, and nose of their hapless mammalian victims. It had none of the infectious stealth of disease-mongers like mosquitoes, with their incumbent coterie of parasitic hangers-on. It didn't even have any annoying agricultural habits, unlike the notorious medfly (also known, confusingly, as a fruit fly), which grabbed headlines by destroying citrus crops in California and Europe. As far as I was concerned, screwworm flies, mosquitoes, medflies, and the like were the real party animals: flies that evolution had blessed with intrinsically interesting lives. The fruit fly, on the other hand, seemed like an early-to-bed-with- a-cup-of-hot-cocoa sort of fly. But my feelings about the fly soon changed. After finishing my degree, I went looking for a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, and was confronted with a baffling choice of projects and organisms. At the time, I was more concerned with the organism than the details of the science. My main priority was to work on a proper animal, something brightly colored with fur or feathers living in a remote part of the Amazon. Unfortunately, this seemed