The fruit fly had its 15 minutes of fame during this year's presidential campaign when fruit fly research was singled out for special scorn. The charge that fruit fly research was irrelevant and a waste of taxpayer money left most biologists (as well as fruit growers) slack jawed. Why do you start to sing the praises of Drosophila melanogaster? For starters, you could mention that Drosophila had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine at least four times. This fly was painted by Edith M. Wallace in 1919 for fruit fly geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan who won Drosophila's first Nobel in 1933. On Sunday at the ASCB meeting, Mimi Shirasu-Hiza of Stanford University laid out another new "fly" frontier--the intriguing connection between circadian rhythm and innate immunity.
To read and/or download this story from our "Novel & Newsworthy" section of "Cell Biology 2008" go to:
https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Shirasu-Hiza.pdf
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