The Fly People

The fly lab was as distinctive a domestic ecology for its human inhabitants, the fly people, as for its dipteran denizens. There drosophilas were reconstructed as "standard" flies, and there, too, students and visitors were transformed into drosophilists and assimilated into a working community with its peculiar customs, ways of life, and moral economy. The fly group's rules of communal behavior constituted the design of an intricate piece of social technology, much as linkage maps constituted the design of a laboratory instrument. Drosophila and the drosophilists evolved symbiotically, and the customs of the fly people were adapted to the special qualities of their breeder reactor. Drosophila was designed to take advantage of its potential for abundant, fast-paced production, and so, too, was the fly group. The fly group's rules of ownership, access, and credit were shaped by the peculiarities of the creature they had adopted -- or that had adopted them. Fly and fly people became dependent on each other for their identities and livelihoods, bound together in doing experiments [91].

Kohler, Robert E. Lords of the Fly : Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0226450627.