Profile of David J. Anderson

Abstract

You are at a picnic and a wasp is circling. You swat it away, but it buzzes back again and again, more persistent each time. The wasp seems angry. Or is it? Can insects be “angry”? David J. Anderson believes that what we perceive as insect anger may share a foundation with human frustration or aggression. His model is Drosophila , which “has been such a powerful system for studying so many aspects of behavior,” he said, “that it's appropriate to ask whether flies have the building blocks of emotion.” “Insect emotion” is the latest focus of Anderson's group, which has previously worked on the developing nervous and circulatory systems. He enjoys the creative freedom of the pioneer, and his group is perpetually in transition to new fields. Anderson, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was named to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. “Aggressive behavior has a lot of negative consequences in society,” Anderson said. “People are concerned about the extent to which the origins of impulsive violence are genetic or environmental.” His inaugural article, published in the April 15, 2008 issue of PNAS, considers how the environment acts on a fly's genes during its lifetime to affect its level of aggression (1). Fruit flies, like other insects, exhibit aggressive behavior, which is perhaps related to territoriality and competition for mates. Drosophila aggression has been documented for nearly a century, but research into this topic has recently been reinvigorated, thanks to new work by Edward Kravitz, who for many years studied aggression in lobsters and who also taught Anderson during a summer neurobiology course in 1979. Across the animal kingdom, research has shown that males that mature in solitude tend to be more aggressive as adults than well-socialized individuals. Anderson's graduate student Liming Wang …