Books by Michael Ashburner

This is the story of the sequencing of the fly genome as told by one of the participants, Michael Ashburner. Written in a diary-like form, half the story is told in numerous footnotes. Ashburner has written a delightful, candid, irreverent, on-the-scene tale filled with eccentric personalities all focused on a single goal. The book also contains an Epilogue that puts Drosophila as a model system in historical context, and an Afterword that discusses the impact the genome sequence has had on the study of Drosophila. Also included are portraits by Lewis Miller of some of the principal characters.