She believes it may be feasible in ten years to have a pill that prevents brain degeneration brought on by polyglutamine-repeat diseases. In the fall of 1997, the Packard Foundation recognized Bonini as one of the most promising science researchers at an American university and awarded her a grant to continue this research. In the movie The Fly, a scientist is turned into a monster of sorts when a fly's genetic material gets mixed into his genes during a teleportation experiment. When we consider the implications of genetic engineering, the image of some misbegotten creature is often summoned up, and it inhabits our collective nightmare about the on-rushing future. But contemporary research is revealing that the genetic stuff that makes up the engine of life is already intermingled.
Subsequent studies show that they work the same.
We look at the fly and we look at ourselves, and we seem quite different. The same complex of genes is being used for eye development in humans as is being used for eye development in flies, and yet there are many, many differences between our eyes and the fly's. To me, it's really phenomenal. Dr. Randy Pittman, chair of the Graduate Group in Pharmacological Sciences at Penn's Medical School, is one of Bonini's research collaborators who studies the effects of trinucleotide-repeat maladies in humans. By developing the first model of a human neurodegenerative disease in a genetically powerful organism like Drosophila , the impact of her work goes well beyond the seven to eight known triplet-repeat diseases.