Will I love Time, Love, Memory?

This book made me think even fruitflies might have minds. Before reading this, I didn’t have a good grip on how we could even start to connect whole-body behaviors with specific genes. I was drawn in by the elegance of the early experiments with fruit flies. I remained mesmerized by the fact that when these investigations began in the early twentieth century, scientists were not sure what a gene was or even whether they were really real.

To understand how genes relate to traits of whole fruit flies, such as eye color and wing shape, scientists had to figure out… show more.

A poetic account of fruit fly genetics and how it revolutionized the study of evolution and heredity. Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “fly room” at Columbia University was where it all happened in the first decades of the 20th century as he and his students turned Drosophila melanogaster into what has become the model organism of genetic research.

After reading this book, you’ll never swat another fruity fly again.