Review

It is Sunday and I am facing a week of working in a job that I often enjoy, but do not love. I will spend long hours in the hospital, including three nights, and at the end of it I will be tired, older, and financially better off. With that kind of outlook, I would make a poor ambassador for the life of a doctor. If I wrote about its excitements and rewards, I could count on my heart not reflecting my words. My account would be pale and shallow next to that of a doctor who was enthused and passionate. Actually, it would be worse, since it might seem (incorrectly) that it was medicine itself that was pale and shallow, rather than just my experience of it. Were I to aim for a tone of disarming humor, I would be guaranteed to fail and manage only derogatory flippancy. The ideas and characters of medicine could never come alive in my hands, since they are not, in this mood, alive in my heart.

Martin Brookes appears to have written Fly: An Experimental Life while feeling similarly disenchanted about his subject, and it shows. Brookes structures his book around the fly's "curriculum vitae . . . a checklist of the twentieth century's biological landmarks: the foundations of genetics, the fusion of genetics and evolutionary biology, the genetic dissection of behavior, embryonic development, and aging." He begins autobiographically with an early encounter:

Inside the cage, John and Yoko were going through the mating ritual. John was the more active of the two, vibrating various bits of his anatomy at physically implausible speeds, while Yoko looked on impassively. Peering through the Perspex walls, we whispered laddish encouragement, urging John to make his move. When, eventually, he did, climbing on top of his partner from the rear, the studious silence of the genetics class was interrupted by our loud chorus of orgasmic cheers.

It is very much a picture of science as viewed from the back of the classroom, an environment where genuine interest and sincere enthusiasm are uncool and prurient irreverence is the order of the day. "Physically implausible" says nothing about the fly's vibrations, only something about the ignorance of the viewer. The assumption that the female fly is impassive is a poor one: Sexual creatures are rarely impassive about copulation. Brookes begins by capturing well that feeling of mild and shallow curiosity that can so readily, given the right teachers and a bit of imagination, blossom into a love of learning.

At its best, Fly has a touch of real excitement about it. This is particularly true when certain of the scientists themselves come alive, Dobzhansky being the most vivid. Who can fail to like a man who says of statistical articles:

I am not a mathematician at all. My way of reading Sewall Wright's papers, which I still think is perfectly defensible, is to examine the biological assumptions which the man is making, and then read the conclusions which he arrives at, and hope to goodness that what comes in between is correct.

Brookes gives a fascinating account of the use of the fruit fly to identify genes involved in specific mental processes (chiefly learning and memory). Characteristically, he undermines himself immediately, moving from intriguing experiments to speculations that aim for ridiculousness rather than interest. "And how about engineering MI5 agents with an extra dose of a CREB gene to give them a photographic memory. With the heat-shock promoter included, spying would have to be restricted to hot spots such as Africa and the Middle East." In true tabloid style, a cold shower of silliness quenches any danger of thoughtfulness.

Any doctoral study has an individuality about it that can make it seem beautifully eccentric, and this is true of the author's description of his own work on moths. Brookes' account of himself is self-mocking, belittling, and more than a little inviting of someone to point a finger and sneer. It has an element of ambiguity to it when sandwiched in the middle of his account of Dobzhansky. Even if he is not passionate about his own science, he is capable, for a while, of wholeheartedly admiring somebody who was. Brookes speaks of describing his work to his family and being "invariably met with contempt and disdain." As his uncle once said, "The money that us taxpayers are spending on those bloody moths could put an extra lane on the M25 between Watford and Staines."

In a world where getting and spending are the priority, science will always remain under desperate threat. While it may provide economic value, it is poisoned by any attempt to make that its basic aim. At one stage, Brookes attempts to defend evolutionary genetics on the basis of its practical benefits, something unlikely to convince his uncle. His compulsion to demonstrate practical relevance perhaps underlies his continual habit of making silly extrapolations from interesting foundations. He suggests, for example, that experiments on fly learning might mean that "memories lost by blows to the head could be resurrected, while painful and traumatic memories could be chemically excised." Presumably he feels these comments make the experiments "relevant" to the reader, yet science cannot be successfully defended in terms of finance or of interest in such direct terms. If one is being practical, an extra lane on a busy motorway will always deserve our money and attention more.

One must value other things about life in order to properly defend or popularize science. Space exploration cannot be sold on the basis of developing Teflon; the stars must be allowed to seem wonderful in their own right. The same is true of Drosophila, and Brookes does at least realize that popularizing science, like wooing a loved one, is a courtship. Rather than being passionate, however, his strategy is to aim for disarming light-heartedness:

Apart from the odd weirdo, most biologists do not study the fly solely because they are in love with the minutiae of fruit fly biology. They study the fly in the hope that it will offer pointers to a broader biological picture, one that embraces a wide range of organisms, including ourselves.

His flippancy is neither particularly funny nor, I think, correct. It is hard to imagine that one can be a good fruit fly specialist without being enchanted by the creature for its own virtues. Brookes demonstrates that this is as true for those who write about them as those who study them. Readers with a scientific background are likely to find his poking-fun-at-the-geeks buffoonery off-putting, while others will not have their hearts won over by it. The book is often a pleasant enough experience, but akin to an extended and mediocre newspaper article on the subject. This is disappointing, since Brookes clearly had both the material and the talent to write a genuinely good book. Yoko-the-fly's impassiveness in the face of great events was probably illusory; Brookes', unfortunately, seems real. Drosophila melanogaster, the black-bellied dew-lover, deserves better.