Of Flies and Men

Abstract

Humorist Robert Benchley told of a bright but unprepared student who, when tested on the Canadian-American conflict Newfoundland fishing rights, wrote that the dispute had sometimes been seen from the Canadian perspective, and sometimes from the American, but that he was going to look at it from the viewpoint of the fish! That is the clever spirit which animates Robert E. Kohler's Lords of the Fly. Kohler's study recounts the pioneering genetics research of the Thomas H. Morgan laboratory at Columbia University and California Institute of Technology from roughly 1907 to 1942. Kohler downplays intellectual history and focuses instead on the daily work and lifestyle of the experimentalists, particularly the material culture and craft of the lab. His book is unique in that its laboratory instrument was a living being, Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly. The fact that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently issued the first patent on a genetically altered mouse suggests that this is a concept whose time has come.' Over the centuries, fruit flies became semi-domesticated by clustering around orchards, wineries, and garbage piles to feast on the decaying plants and fruit. Their cultivation by scientists was not a drastic step, Kohler claims, because laboratories and landscapes are not such different places as may appear (p. 10). Throughout the book Kohler portrays the flies not as passive objects but as participants. Kohler's Drosophila is a co-worker (p. 1), fellow laborer (p. 23), and active players (p. 19) in the experiments. His flies are colonizers of the lab (p. 50) which take over the experiments (p. 44). They happily bred year-round in the warmth of college labs (p. 34) in their cozy, protected mailing tubes (p. 53). Thus this is probably the first history book in which people share the limelight with flies. Kohler brings impressive credentials to the study. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry and spent three years at the bench in Harvard microbiology labs. Since 1973 he has been professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Depart-