The fly is a mutant, bearing a defective gene that causes a deadly human disease in the same family as Alzheimer's. Ritson, 27, an Oxford-trained scientist who seeks her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, wants to know how the gene works so she can thwart the disease, both in flies and one day in humans, who share a surprising number of genetic similarities.
This month, Ritson and her supervisor, J. Paul Taylor, announced intriguing progress.
With some skillful genetic manipulation, they suppressed the mutant insect's ability to pass on the rare disease to its offspring. And curiously, they found the disease shares a genetic kinship with others that attack the brain and nervous system, including a common type of dementia and Lou Gehrig's disease. It suggests they might all be treated with a single drug.
"All of these diseases may be different manifestations of the same underlying problem," said Taylor, 45, who has moved from Penn to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. "And many researchers may have been unwittingly working on the same thing."
He is convinced the humble fruit fly will help crack the case: cheap to raise, fast to reproduce, easy to tweak the genetic recipe.
The insect, formally called Drosophila melanogaster (dark-bellied dew-lover), has been extensively studied, providing the foundation for much of modern biology in the past century. Yet its use to study disease in humans is more recent, and is still viewed skeptically by some.
The project in Taylor's lab, which The Inquirer followed for three years, shows how science can be a plodding affair, marked by frustrations and unknowns in between glimpses of understanding.
For the ambitious scientist and his earnest graduate student, the quest began in a small white room, with a jar full of insects and a paintbrush.
Muscle, bone, and brain
