Fruit flies that live to ripe ages may seem simply more annoying than usual. More than a quarter million fruit flies live in Joseph Graves, Jr.'s laboratory at Arizona State University's West Campus. Typically, the flies begin to reproduce a scant eight hours after being born. Graves has studied the tiny insects for more than a decade in pursuit of greater understanding of senescence, the process of aging.
Graves is an associate professor of life sciences and an expert on evolutionary genetics.
I was involved with the world's first research stocks of Drosophila melanogaster that exhibited the phenomenon of postponed senescence. In other words, these fruit flies had significantly longer life spans than the flies from which they were derived. Graves left the University of California, Irvine in July 1994 to join the ASU West faculty. While UC Irvine has some of the world's top evolutionary geneticists, Graves feels he can make more of an impact, both as a teacher and a scholar, at a school that is building a brand new faculty. Graves' current interests focus on two areas.