FLY: The Unsung Hero of 20th-Century Science
Martin Brookes, . . Ecco, $24 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-06-621251-7
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
Reviewed on: 09/10/2001
Genre: Nonfiction