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Scientists took 13 years and $3 billion to decode the human genome – the complete genetic blueprint, published in 2003, on how to build a human being. Today, with ever more powerful technologies at hand, researchers are on the brink of sequencing the genome of any individual, with all his or her genetic quirks, in the space of weeks for hundreds of thousands of dollars. None of this would have been possible without the Fly Room.

Such was the title given in the early 1900s to Room 613 in Schermerhorn Hall at Columbia University in New York City, where Thomas Hunt Morgan set up a laboratory to study inheritance in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. It was there that Morgan bred an unusual fly with white eyes instead of red, a mutation that helped him unravel the puzzle of how organisms pass their traits from generation to generation. (In a word: genes.)

The Fly Room was significant not only for the discoveries made there, but for the laboratory structure it pioneered. Rather than following the traditional strict hierarchy of an all-powerful lab head, researchers worked collaboratively and democratically on projects together. Still, many Fly Room alumni – most notably Hermann Muller, who would win a 1946 Nobel Prize for discovering that X-rays cause genetic mutations – later derided it as a place where unscrupulous lab members stole ideas and credit from one another.

James Schwartz's new history of genetics is full of such inside stories that illuminate the process and players of science as much as the science itself. All the familiar characters are here, including the 19th-century pioneers Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, and Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who experimented with breeding pea plants.

But Darwin struggles with explaining the mechanism of evolution, to the point that he encourages, far longer than he should, his cousin's dubious experiments with transfusing blood between rabbits in an attempt to prove a theory called pangenesis (later discredited). And Mendel turns out to be a high-strung depressive who might not have ever made it through his education had his younger sister not helped him out with her dowry.

Personal insights such as these are one welcome aspect of Mr. Schwartz's tale. Another is his level of attention to the experimental systems themselves. Mr. Schwartz has gone back to the original letters and papers of the genetics pioneers to explain fully what hypothesis was being tested, how the researchers went about testing it, and why they reached their ultimate conclusions. Mendel's pea plants and Morgan's fruit flies, in short, take center stage nearly as much as their masters.

As a result, In Pursuit of the Gene offers a rare glimpse at science in action, in which major discoveries are not foregone conclusions from the start, but often result from researchers stumbling down blind alleys until, through sheer force of curiosity and reason, they unearth a previously unknown tenet of nature.

Alexandra Witze is chief of correspondents for America for the international science journal Nature.

From Darwin to DNA

James Schwartz

(Harvard University Press, $29.95)

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