This post is part of a series documenting Professor Steve Steve's recent visit to Philadelphia for the Drosophila Research Conference (aka, the Fly Meeting).
After tracking down Steve Steve in the lobby of the hotel on Saturday, we picked up some food at the Reading Terminal Market -- a permanent sort-of-farmers-market next to the Philly Convention Center. The place was pretty packed, due in part to the Flower Show going on next door. Steve Steve was a little bummed that he didn't have time to check out any of the garden displays -- being an amateur horticulturalist and developer of the theory of non-self-proto-compatibility in island populations of the small speckled daisy shrub -- but we had a poster session to attend.
Photos of Steve Steve visiting exhibits can be found below the fold.
A little known fact about Professor Steve Steve is that he did a brief sabbatical in Thomas Morgan's lab in the 1930s. This was inspired by a visit to Morgan's lab at Columbia in 1919. I have recovered an old photograph of Steve Steve with the Drosophila crew (Steve Steve can be seen in the center explaining the finer points of genetic mapping to Calvin Bridges).
Steve Steve informed me that he is interested in re-exploring some of the research he performed with Morgan, Sturtevant, and Dobzhanksy at Caltech. For example, Steve Steve plans to test his theory of mini-drosophila mediated chromosomal segregation -- whereby microscopic flies are responsible for the proper segregation of homologous chromosomes, and sub-microscopic flies are responsible for the proper segregation of homologs in the microscopic flies, but the submicroscopic flies do not have flies in their nuclei because that would just be silly -- thanks to the recent advances in molecular genetic techniques. This theory was first presented by Prof. Steve in the Proceedings of the Plebian Society for the Study of Intracellular Dipterans.
A lot of the fly pushing techniques have changed since Steve last worked with Drosophila. For example, many labs now use carbon dioxide to anesthetize flies, but Steve Steve used ether while in the Morgan lab. I introduced Steve Steve to one of the vendors specializing in Drosophila supplies.
Steve Steve was most interested in the CO2 hoses and fly pads. He took a peek at the fly under the magnifying glass and remarked that they were much bigger than he remembered. I politely pointed out to him that the fly under the glass was a plastic replica, and not done to proper scale.
We were both eager to check out the new journal specializing exclusively on Drosophila research, although naming the journal "Fly" seems a bit presumptuous for a journal that focuses on a single genus of flies rather than the entire taxon. Steve Steve perused a sample issue to see if any advances had been made in the area of thermal-temporal-osmo-regulation of the Drosophila metabolome (on which he had published a model describing the interaction of glyco-kinetics and days that start with the letter T).
After viewing posters for a couple of hours, Steve Steve needed to wind down. We headed to the hotel bar with a few other Drosophilists and grabbed a couple of beers. Steve Steve was disappointed to discover that the Marriott bar did not serve Bamboo Ale, but he was okay drinking a Guinness.
Up next: Steve Steve goes out drinking with the Drosophila evolutionary geneticists and we drive back to Central PA.
- Log in to post comments