Fruit flies have done more good than Sarah Palin

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Oct. 31, 2011 7:30PM EDT

While running for vice-president of the U.S., Sarah Palin made a speech in which she mocked research involving fruit flies, saying it has little or nothing to do with public good. Three years later, fruit flies and the scientists who study them have done far more good than she has.

The French biologist Jules Hoffmanns research using drosophila won a Canada Gairdner Award last week for work that has revolutionized the understanding of the immune system, by discovering the main keys to its activation. He also won part of this years Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When I first started working on insects, I realized that they do not suffer from infections and wondered why that was so, he told the Gairdner Foundation. And so we hoped that from that we would learn something about human immunity.

The fundamental question behind the research was why insects are able to destroy one-third of the worlds crops. That led to new insights into the defence mechanisms that organisms including human beings use against infectious agents.

We believe strongly in evolution, so we were sure that anything from an ancient group would be conserved in a more recent group, like mammals, and will teach us the basics of the immune system, said Dr. Hoffmann. So I was very excited and lucky to make these discoveries.

As a result, there are now a range of clinical trials concerning cancer immunotherapy, allergies, autoimmune diseases and septic shock. These could lead to more effective vaccines to counteract cancer and to treat bacterial and viral infections.

Basic research, said Michael Hayden, himself a Gairdner winner and director of the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the Child and Family Research Institute in Vancouver, leads us to ideas that can be further developed for innovation that can have major implications that you cant always see.

While! funding sources increasingly favour targeted research, it is important to remember that basic research can produce great results, even when these are unexpected.