“Do you know what unc-64 stands for?”
This is actually a reasonable question, coming from a “fly person” to a “worm person.”
I’m the worm person — I got my Ph.D. studying aging in the model organism C. elegans. Recently, I got to talk to Hugo Bellen, a well-known fruit fly researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, about something that I’ve always appreciated, but never quite understood: Why are fruit fly gene names so … cool?
