The Fly Room

The story of the scientists who invented genetics and proved the theory of evolution

The Fly Room tells the story of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan’s laboratory at Columbia University where, in the early twentieth century, he presided over a handful of students and a roomful of fruit flies who taught him that everything he thought was true was wrong, and everything he thought was wrong was right.

Before Morgan’s time, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was regarded as a subject unworthy of serious scientific study—not something you would hear discussed in a laboratory. In its place rose the dark specter of eugenics, with its attendant sinister ambitions to create a superior human race.

But Morgan and his students, by experimenting with and breeding fruit flies, invented genetics, which would eventually lead to the refutation of the theory of eugenics and prove Darwin’s theory of evolution right. Meanwhile in Soviet Russia, a country convulsed by revolution, genetics came under attack, forcing researchers to seek refuge in the United States and discover for themselves the scientific breakthroughs taking place in Morgan’s laboratory.

Both a collective biography of the men and women who pioneered the field of genetics, as well as a history of how genetics was invented and proven to be the science of evolution, The Fly Room is a compelling read about a fascinating branch of science whose innovations benefit us to the present day.