All for All

I n this small and charming book, Won for All, Michael Ashburner gives us a glittering account of the sequencing of the Drosophila genome by a public–private partnership between government-funded laboratories and Celera Genomics. He portrays both the working life and the good life of science, with neat character sketches set off by Lewis Miller's excellent portraits. Michael's fl air for detail and inveterate name-dropping, albeit of restaurants rather than people, lends itself nicely to recreating the time and place of key events in this collaboration. The original fast-paced manuscript, which I liked so well when I fi rst saw a draft in 2001, has been updated and provided with extensive footnotes that inform without interrupting the narrative. Technical background is given in two excellent postscripts: a fl y primer from Scott Hawley, and an overview of fl y functional genomics from Ethan Bier. Michael and I have been orbiting around Cambridge (the original one, as he puts it) for many years. Our paths intersect occasionally and pleasantly, but never so forcibly as over genomics—in keeping with Maurice Wilkins' remark to Horace Judson that: " DNA, you know, is Midas' gold. Everyone who touches it goes mad " [1]. It has indeed proved so in the age of sequencing genomes. One of the emergent themes of the book is competition between animal model organisms, which was intense from the 1960s to the 1990s. Flies, worms, molluscs, mice, and men: each had its own set of dedicated followers, and each had strengths and weaknesses in the common goal of understanding the biology of animals and humans in particular. At a slightly greater distance, there was competition with microorganisms and plants for understanding life in general. Compared with the nematode worm, on which I worked, the fl y was the doyen, with half a century of intensive work behind it, 10-fold more researchers, a rich morphology of wings and legs and bristles, and a huge range of sophisticated genetic techniques. The worm was a shy newcomer, kicked into excitement by Sydney Brenner, who chose it for its small size and rapid growth. Never mind the fl y's sophistication; for those of us who came early the worm was a sandpit to play in: anything we did was novel because so little had been done before. With the advent of molecular cloning in the 1970s, developmental biology entered a new and thrilling phase. …