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Biologist Ethan Bier runs a laboratory at the University of California, San Diego where fruit flies are used to help unravel the processes that lead to some human diseases. One day recently, a graduate student in the lab called him over to take a look at the results of the latest experiment.
Bier was stunned by what he saw. "It was one of the most astounding days in my personal scientific career," Bier says. "When he first showed me, I could not believe it."
His student, Valentino Gantz, had found a way to get brown fruit flies to produce blond-looking offspring most of the time.
"When the next generation came out and almost all the kids were blond," Bier says, everyone in the lab was "jumping up and down."
Turning fruit flies from brown to yellow might not sound like a major achievement. But it was. It showed that scientists had a very fast and easy way to permanently change an entire species.
"I believe it's going to transform the world of genetics," Bier says, "because it's...