I hope the conference will catalyze a sense of the magnitude of the problem and the presence of possible solutions. A bug seems an unlikely place to look for remedies to human illnesses, unless you study the molecular architecture in the cells of Drosophila melanogaster , the fruit fly. Bonini is a research scientist and an assistant professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She became interested in D. melanogaster as a Princeton biology major doing undergraduate research. Since her appointment at Penn in 1994, Bonini has conducted pioneering genetic research that promises to accelerate our understanding of how certain fatal neurodegenerative diseases afflict the brain, bringing closer the day when a cure can be found.
Fruit flies are geneticists' experimental animal of choice.
What's more, flies possess many of the same genes as humans. In fact, researchers are finding that many of the same genes are present across species despite half a billion years of independent evolution, leading many scientists to speculate that the diversity of life evolved from a common ancestor. Her words are delivered in sober and measured tones, but the adverbs have exclamation points. Genes are so fundamentally conserved that we can really use the fly as a model for the human system. It's also easier to track the cascade of biochemical events unleashed by genes in the far simpler anatomy of Drosophila than in the neural labyrinth of Homo sapiens .