Drunken Drosophila

It began with a simple observation in 1993. Ulrike Heberlein - then an investigator at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco - placed a fruit fly in a little chamber, gave it a puff of alcohol vapor, and monitored its reaction. "What we observed is that a fly behaves just like any other organism when under the influence of alcohol," she says. "First thing it does is become really excited. It runs around really quickly and starts bumping into things." Keep the alcohol coming, and inebriated flies grow increasingly uncoordinated. "Eventually they just sort of fall over and lie there," says Heberlein. Recovery from a binge is no prettier. "They get up, they fall down again. You just observe these tiny little flies and you can relate to them," she says. "You think, this is awfully similar to something that maybe I experienced once in my life."