Here at the California Institute of Technology, one of the top universities in the world, the list of Nobel laureates is long (over 30); even longer is the list of scientific discoveries that have benefited humankind.
Roughly eighty years ago, for example, a team led by Thomas Hunt Morgan, the most distinguished biologist in the United States of his time, discovered the role of genes and chromosomes in heredity.
This is also where the different roles played by the two hemispheres of the brain were determined.
It is a small campus. There are roughly 900 undergraduates and 1200 graduate students here, and they are all extremely bright. The entering students have consistently higher average test scores (on the SAT 1 and 2) than any other university or college in the U.S.
My son Peter is doing his Phd here, researching the behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly.
Here's a whiteboard where he presented a series of algebraic calculations to a group of visiting students last Friday.
You may recall that Sarah Palin made fun of this kind of research during last year's campaign. Of course, Palin is well-known for having a brain smaller than a fruit fly's, which is why she didn't know that, according to the National Institutes of Health, "The tiny insects, which bear little resemblance to people, nevertheless share much of our genetic heritage. Fruit flies possess strikingly similar versions of the genes that promote normal human development and, when altered, contribute to disease."
We toured the lab where Peter works today, and saw the cooler where flies are cultivated.
They are subjected to a type of virtual reality that allows Peter and the other researchers to monitor their behavior under ever-changing conditions that simulate their real-world environments.
Seen up close in enlarged photos, these red-eyed creatures seem strangely familiar -- not unlike what science fiction film-makers often imagine aliens from outer space to look like.
Of course, if life has evolved elsewhere, it probably is made of the same building blocks as we are, and therefore could easily look like fruit flies.
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