Governor Sarah Palin has never made this community more excited than with her recent pejorative comments about fruit fly research, which, she says, has "little or nothing to do with the public good." (See it on YouTube here.) Over at Think Progress, bloggers note that this kind of research has in fact led to advances in our understanding of autism. Meantime, Mike the Mad Biologist dug into the particular project Palin criticized, finding that it was for studying a type of fruit fly that was threatening olive groves needed to feed people. Michael White at Adaptive Complexity takes the opportunity to write a post extolling the virtues of model org research. "One of the things budding geneticists, biochemists and cell biologists learn very quickly when they enter grad school is that studying humans is usually not the best way to successfully tackle the most interesting research questions," he writes.
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