DOWN MEMORY LANE

A reader who knows something of my past sent me a link to this story in the New York Times. It concerns an effort to keep alive large numbers of little bugs, useful in scientific research, known colloquially as fruit flies. This story took me back to 1948 when my big sister, Barbara, was a senior at Forest Hills high school in Queens, New York. The chairman of the biology department, Paul Brandwein, had decided to make a run at the newly established national competition for high school science students sponsored by the Westinghouse Corporation. The competition was officially called The Westinghouse Science Talent Search. High school seniors all over America took a written science examination and did science research projects which they wrote up and submitted. 40 girls and boys (we talked that way then) were selected as national winners on the basis of their projects, having already made it to Honorable Mention status by their performance on the examination. They were then brought to Washington DC for a one-week all-expenses-paid trip where they were interviewed by scientists. A top boy and top girl in the competition each received a college scholarship of $2400, which in those days paid for four years of tuition.

 

Barbara was the grand national girl winner her year with a project on phenocopies in Drosophila Melanogaster – fruit flies. Fruit flies are beloved by geneticists because apparently they have enormous chromosomes, making them easy to study under the microscope (this is 72 years ago, remember.) Barbara irradiated fruit flies with ultraviolet light, causing them to produce somatic changes that mimicked genetic changes but were in fact not inheritable. She used a microscope that my father had kept in the basement, a relic of his long years as a high school biology teacher (and a friend of Brandwein.) Barbara did her best to confine her research to the basement but inevitably some of the little critters escaped and every evening as the family sat at dinner a little crowd of fruit flies gathered over the table.

 

As I think I have recounted in my autobiography, I as the little brother actually got in on the act at one point. Barbara was invited to make a presentation of her research at a science fair in Manhattan but the date coincided with her interview at Swarthmore College so I was deputized to take her place.

 

Ever since these events so long ago, fruit flies have had a special place in my heart and I was pleased to read that they are being looked after so well.

The Westinghouse, as we called it colloquially, was taken over by Intel and in 2007, AOC came in second in the microbiology category (by then they no longer had "girl" and "boy" divisions.) This fact inclined me to support her even before I had a clear idea of her politics.:-)