One of them, which made the cuticle short and spiky, they named hedgehog. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus found 15 mutations that resulted in odd-looking cuticles. “Performing a screen,” writes Mohr, “is often an endurance event.” Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus then spent a year sitting side by side at the microscope, looking for individual mutants with unusual cuticles.
They performed what is called a “forward genetic screen”-in which tens of thousands of male fruit flies are fed a chemical that induces mutations and then individually mated with a female. In the 1970s, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus in Heidelberg, Germany, were studying a topic that probably sounds hopelessly trivial: patterns in the cuticle, or the protective outer layer, of fruit-fly larvae. 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.Ĭonsider the story of the gene memorably named Sonic hedgehog. 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. Research into Drosophila has resulted in at least five Nobel Prizes.įirst in Fly by Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr is a thorough chronicle of the contributions of these creatures to science over the past century. As are the genes that govern a fruit fly’s circadian rhythm and the ones that give us jet lag. 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. 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. No single animal has contributed as much to the field of genetics as the ordinary and ubiquitous Drosophila melanogaster. In fact, a popular appreciation of fruit flies has seemed long overdue to me. This is to say that I came to First in Fly, a new book about fruit-fly research, with perhaps some special interest. 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. It was not difficult-as anyone with a fruit-fly infestation can tell you-but the repetitive work imprinted itself on my brain. In college, I worked briefly in a fruit-fly lab, where I spent most of my time just keeping different fly strains alive.
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