Fruit Flies & Ms Palin

Ms Palin thinks research on fruit flies, a model organism for lab studies same as mice, is a waste of money. Watch the video if you missed this unintended bit of comedy by veep candidate.



To emphasize her disbelief at the fact that researchers could be studying such a lowly creature, instead of looking for solutions to human conditions like autism, Ms Palin folksily added, "I kid you not!" Perhaps, she expected us to join in with raised eyebrows.Scary. All Tina Fey has to do to get the laughs is repeat this without embellishment in SNL.

So how does the humble Drosophila melanogaster help us understand human disease better?
A neat article from the NIH site explains some of the many ways. And sometimes, fruitflies have to be studied for themselves to prevent crop infestations which could cause farmers thousands of dollars....

Update: So the latter is what she might have been referring to apparently.