Dr Carmena has strong views on how we should treat the humble fruit fly.
Scientists are ready to publish the fruit fly genome, which will help them study human disease.
The fruit fly, (Drosophila melanogaster), on the other hand, does not have this problem.
The first clue came from studies of the geneticists' pet insect, the humble fruit fly.
Technical innovation lasts about as long as a fruit fly in today's Web ecology, which has become everyone's.
The entire fruit fly genome is already available on digital disk for reference.
As for Chalfie's girlfriend, a noted fruit fly researcher name Tulle Hazelrigg: The two married, and both are professors at Columbia.
Although I still can't look at a fruit fly without cringing just a little, I went on to take his biochemistry class and excelled.
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In the future, the scientists hope to use their new microscope to investigate how organs and tissues form in the fruit fly and other organisms.
"Our ability to grow Plasmodium in the fruit fly is especially fortunate because scientists recently determined the complete sequence of the Drosophila genome, " says Dr Shahabuddin.
The fruit fly, one of science's other favourite lab models, has already been subjected to extensive chemical mutagenesis, providing researchers with a wealth of useful genomic data.
This is a rare brain disorder that is caused by an autoimmune response which destroys the human equivalents of the ion channels that are affected in the mutant fruit fly.
The similarity between the genetic make-up of the fruit fly and that of human being is well-known, and scientists are hoping that this breakthrough could eventually lead to understanding of addiction to narcotics.
"My dream is that these transposable elements will be tools that we can use to make the mouse more like the fruit fly, " says David Largaespada, a researcher at the University of Minnesota.
But similar elements were found in fruit flies, allowing scientists to find out what genes do by knocking them out one by one and making the fruit fly the workhorse of modern science.
Should a bottle of memory pills appear on your nightstand one day, a heap of credit will go to Tully and Kandel, with an assist from two of God's lowliest creatures: the fruit fly and the sea slug.
They were expected to come out with at least one stunning conclusion right off the bat, and they did: Human beings had about 32, 000 genes, give or take several thousand--not that much more than a fruit fly or a worm.
Dana Carroll, a biochemist at the University of Utah who has licensed some research to Sangamo, has run fruit fly experiments using zinc finger nucleases in which the flies' genomes were cut in unintended places apart from the target area.
Working with the geneticists' favourite animal, the fruit fly Drosophila, Dr Gibson has pinpointed a series of so-called cryptic variations that have no effect on a protein's structure, but can nevertheless, if the circumstances are right, have a significant effect on the individual they belong to.
With the help of Chiara Cirelli, who also works at the University of Wisconsin, Dr Tononi has created a mutant fruit fly that sleeps only two or three hours a night. (A normal fly sleeps between eight and 14 hours.) The mutation itself is in a gene for a nerve-cell protein of a type known as an ion channel.
The images are then merged to create a three-dimensional look at the sample, in this case a fruit-fly embryo.
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