FLY: The Unsung Hero of 20th-Century Science

Like Zelig, the ubiquitous guy who turns up at historical moments, Brookes's fruit fly, "a reliable, if unremarkable, laboratory workhorse," is present for some of the great moments in 20th-century science. The fruit fly came to the American South with the slave trade and, later, to the Northeast with the growing trade in rum, sugar and fresh fruits. Around the turn of the century, Victorian biology, with its emphasis on theology and obsessive anatomical description akin to biological stamp collecting, was giving way to experimentalism and Darwin's evolution; at the same time Gregor Mendel's ideas about genetic inheritance were just coming into fashion. Enter Columbia University scientist Thomas Hunt Morgan and his fruit flies—and his experiments that would, Brookes suggests, help usher in the age of experimental biology. Brookes, a popular science writer for New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine and author of What's the Big Idea? Genetics, traces the fruit fly's role in the study of mutation to identify control genes, detailing Hermann Muller's X-ray experiments in the 1920s, and the Nobel Prize–winning work of Ed Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus in the 1970s. Brookes explores Russian-born Theodosius Dobzhansky's work in the 1930s that identified genetic diversity in species and genes as "the currency of evolutionary change"; he includes chapters on studies of fruit fly mating, aging and the genetics of behavior, and ends with the complete sequencing of the fruit fly genome. Brookes appears to have picked a rather narrow topic to write about, which may limit his readership. But his book's enigmatic title alone should warrant a second look, and book buyers just might get hooked. Brookes writes with humor and economy. He places the unsung fruit fly into the much broader and immediate history of the rapidly advancing fields of biology and genetics. (Sept. 11)