{"id":564,"date":"2008-09-03T13:16:33","date_gmt":"2008-09-03T13:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=564"},"modified":"2008-09-03T13:16:33","modified_gmt":"2008-09-03T13:16:33","slug":"hump-day-history-drosophila","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2008\/09\/03\/hump-day-history-drosophila\/","title":{"rendered":"Primer: Drosophila"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What value do historians of science gain from locating a point of\u00a0origin?\u00a0 Scientists, I think, like origins, because it’s customary to give credit where credit is due in scientific papers.\u00a0 Historians can find origins very useful, because they often reveal a certain motivation or meaning in\u00a0a tradition, which was later lost even as the tradition persisted.\u00a0 There’s probably a certain satisfaction to be found in looking at some point in history, and finding that “before this point in time, this idea did not exist.”\u00a0 But there are dangers as well.\u00a0 Meanings change notoriously over time, so when we look for the origin of this or that belief that we hold today, though we may recognize it in the past, it would look quite different to those who “came up” with it.\u00a0 Origins are also slippery in other ways.\u00a0 We often find that when we track them down, some new “predecessor” presents itself, and we’re stuck chasing a constantly retreating\u00a0mirage.\u00a0 Thus, when we bother to track things down, we should make sure we gain value from the act of tracking.<\/p>\n

In the case of genetics, there’s a well-known tradition that dates the study of genetics back to the monk Gregor Mendel and his famous green and yellow peas (get out your Punnett squares, class).\u00a0 There’s even a historical scandal suggesting that Mendel cooked his data: statistically it’s too good.\u00a0 But why should we really care\u00a0about Mendel?\u00a0 I mean, it’s good to know about him, and it’s good to know how others have viewed him and used his precedent to further their own work, but there’s not much value in\u00a0worrying too much about him, specifically.\u00a0 His work wasn’t used or even known until 35 years after its publication in an obscure journal, when it was unearthed by Hugo DeVries and Carl Correns, who were part of a thriving\u00a0botanical\/laboratory-biology\u00a0culture circa 1900 that was already deep in theorization about how traits were passed down from generation to generation.\u00a0 (In 1905, the British biologist William Bateson coined the term “genetics” to describe what this intellectual program was all about, and “Mendelian” came to describe a particular approach within this broader program.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In the history of genetics, there are a lot of places to pin down points of origin for various insights,\u00a0to the point where it may be much more interesting to try and identify points of significance.\u00a0 In the history of genetics, the exploitation of Drosophila<\/em>, or fruit fly, by the American embryologist Thomas Hunt Morgan, surely qualifies.\u00a0 Over decades, Morgan and his large research team refined what\u00a0had begun\u00a0as piecemeal speculation and study into a robust, carefully controlled research program.\u00a0 By carefully breeding fruit flies, they created standard breeds with standard genetic characteristics that could be traced through subsequent generations.\u00a0 The group mapped Drosophila <\/em>chromosomes (already presumed to be the place where traits were passed down), locating specific genes on them, and demonstrated how those genes were passed down and expressed.\u00a0 They also elucidated the process of evolution, charting spontaneous mutations within their Drosophila <\/em>population.\u00a0 In 1915 Morgan and his group published the results of their early research in The Mechanisms of Mendelian Inheritance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Morgan’s significance reaches much further, however.\u00a0 He created a culture<\/em> of genetics research, wherein the Drosophila<\/em> work became a baseline, a model for genetic understanding.\u00a0 In practice, knowing the genetics of the D<\/em>rosophila <\/em>became a proxy for a more general understanding of genetic mechanisms in all organisms, to the point that other groups also used the Drosophila <\/em>for their own general genetic research: even now, Drosophila <\/em>crops up unusually often in research papers.\u00a0 Further still, the thoroughness the Drosophila<\/em> work helped cement a specifically British-American tradition in early-20th-century genetic research that focused on the functions of the chromosomes rather than expressed traits.<\/p>\n

The key source on T. H. Morgan and his Drosophila <\/em>research is a fairly recent classic in the science studies literature: Robert Kohler’s Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life <\/em>(1994).\u00a0 The book is widely cited for demonstrating the standardization of a living organism so as to serve as a piece of laboratory equipment, as well as for demonstrating how Morgan and his crew built a global genetics empire, how they coordinated the mores of a group laboratory culture, etc, etc.\u00a0 If you’re a historian, you know this drill.\u00a0\u00a0Kohler’s sociological\u00a0point (already fairly commonplace in ’94)\u00a0has been copied and pasted into the science studies case study literature again and again.\u00a0 Talk about standardized apparatus!\u00a0 What continues to make Kohler’s book essential\u00a0reading is the fact that the Morgan group’s use of\u00a0fruit flies <\/em>is, by any measure, crucial to know about\u00a0because of\u00a0its\u00a0originating and continuing importance\u00a0as\u00a0a central tradition in genetics research, which is a central tradition of 20th-century biology.\u00a0 Now, if I could only keep the buggers\u00a0out of my garbage!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What value do historians of science gain from locating a point of\u00a0origin?\u00a0 Scientists, I think, like origins, because it’s customary to give credit where credit is due in scientific papers.\u00a0 Historians can find origins very useful, because they often reveal a certain motivation or meaning in\u00a0a tradition, which was later lost even as the tradition<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Primer: Drosophila<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[342,497,1272,1419],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ewp-primer","tag-drosophila","tag-genetics","tag-robert-kohler","tag-thomas-hunt-morgan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}