Our understanding of how genes function, and our capacity to manipulate them, continues to progress at an astonishing rate. But money for scientific and medical research is tight and getting tighter. Most of our interest is in exploiting genes for health and medicine, so why do so many genetic researchers study the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster?
If you wander into any medical genetic research laboratory you may be surprised to discover that a significant number of researchers don’t work on humans at all. The ethical reasons for this are obvious, but even if we exclude issues of morality, humans are a poor genetic research organism, not least because average generation times are around 25 years — simply too long to wait to carry out your genetic crosses.
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