Drunken Flies Mimic Human BehaviorEventually, They Just Passed Out
It was all something of an accident and maybe a bit crazy to boot, says Ulrike Heberlein, a young geneticist who had learned her trade—working with flies—as a postdoctoral fellow in Gerald Rubin's lab at the University of California, Berkeley. She had studied the development of flies' eyes, which was what Rubin did. In 1993, however, Heberlein was already 37 years old and she needed to find a job. "You can only be a postdoc so long," she says. "You have to move on in life and become independent." So she took a job at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco.
The Gallo Center, which is partially funded by winemaker Ernest Gallo, seeks new ways of treating alcoholism. Heberlein's task was to look for the genetic basis of alcoholism in fruit flies.
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