But there's an interesting little excerpt here, on a blog called TV On The Fritz. It's about gay fruit flies. Yup, you read that right.
Now I don't know very much about fruit flies except that they're small, pesky, and reproduce like crazy. I've only had two significant encounters with fruit flies - one was in a biology class when I owned a jarful for a while (and learned about the reproducing part), and the other was the day I nuked some. I just got annoyed, is all, with some fruit flies hanging around a banana, so I tossed the banana in the microwave, fruit flies and all, and turned it on. Cooked those little suckers a good long time. Then I opened the microwave door and they flew right out. Somewhere in Michigan at this very minute there may be a strain of mutant fruit flies preparing to devour the Earth.
So here some scientists come along and do pretty much the same thing, Dowd says, only they do it a little more scientifically (if you believe in scientifically), and they found out that by switching just one gene in the fruit flies they could make them gay. Talk about your life-altering operation, there. (But the fruit flies didn't seem to mind - or if they did, they didn't say.)
I don't know how many genes a fruit fly has but humans have, by one guess, around 30,000. With around 30,000, the human gene count would be only one-third greater than that of the simple roundworm C. elegans at about 20,000 genes. Yikes! Maybe fruit flies have more than humans, I don't know (I told you that) but whatever, one gene is still only one.
Which has got to mean...something, right?
Or maybe not. Why don't you just ask somebody who knows. Leave me out of this, OK? It wasn't my idea.
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