Drosophila melanogaster is a name many hear in science class and, oh yeah, those are fruit flies ... little bugs with big chromosomes ... yah, yah, fascinating.
Bubba, you don't know half the fascination. My ol' Dad didn't study only sheep as it's tough to get too many into a lab so instead geneticists love to screw with fruit flies. They keep them in test tubes with some filthy brown stuff called agar at the bottom and that's the stuff they eat when they hatch. When you want to play with them, you get some ether to knock them out and then shake them onto a slide to look at them with a microscope.
If you're a geneticist, this is the beauty part, man. All these damn little fruit flies and there are so many interesting things about them, aren't there. I'm sure right now you could rattle right off Ten Fascinating Things About Fruit Flies.
No?
A geneticist would. They could probably tell you ten fascinating things about the wings alone.
All of this seems ridiculous to us but all of the things they watch are markers and then they would look, as well as they could at the time, at the genotype to locate where the genes for any specific characteristic lie. From today's perspective, that's prehistoric stuff but it was nevertheless a step toward the mapping of genomes which takes place now.
That's all fine but it doesn't replace the glory of hanging over a microscope to look at anesthetized flies.
And people wonder why I turned out this way.
Keep in mind the perspective of time as DNA had been known since the 19th Century but it wasn't becoming well clear how it worked until the 1940's. I was born in 1950 while my ol' Dad was doing his PhD work and it was in 1953 that Watson and Crick announced the helical structure of DNA. The biochemical aspect that grew from that was not my ol' Dad's primary interest but it gave insights into what he was doing and for many other geneticists for whom this was an explosively exciting time.
Bubba, you don't know half the fascination. My ol' Dad didn't study only sheep as it's tough to get too many into a lab so instead geneticists love to screw with fruit flies. They keep them in test tubes with some filthy brown stuff called agar at the bottom and that's the stuff they eat when they hatch. When you want to play with them, you get some ether to knock them out and then shake them onto a slide to look at them with a microscope.
If you're a geneticist, this is the beauty part, man. All these damn little fruit flies and there are so many interesting things about them, aren't there. I'm sure right now you could rattle right off Ten Fascinating Things About Fruit Flies.
No?
A geneticist would. They could probably tell you ten fascinating things about the wings alone.
All of this seems ridiculous to us but all of the things they watch are markers and then they would look, as well as they could at the time, at the genotype to locate where the genes for any specific characteristic lie. From today's perspective, that's prehistoric stuff but it was nevertheless a step toward the mapping of genomes which takes place now.
That's all fine but it doesn't replace the glory of hanging over a microscope to look at anesthetized flies.
And people wonder why I turned out this way.
Keep in mind the perspective of time as DNA had been known since the 19th Century but it wasn't becoming well clear how it worked until the 1940's. I was born in 1950 while my ol' Dad was doing his PhD work and it was in 1953 that Watson and Crick announced the helical structure of DNA. The biochemical aspect that grew from that was not my ol' Dad's primary interest but it gave insights into what he was doing and for many other geneticists for whom this was an explosively exciting time.
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