"I kid you not!"

"It's like they take pride in being ignorant."

-- Barack Obama

They keep proving his point.

Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

I have it on good authority that the Genome-Technology community hasn't been this excited since the discovery of something they call Zellvergnügen®.

Governor Sarah Palin has never made this community more excited than with her recent pejorative comments about fruit fly research, which, she says, has "little or nothing to do with the public good." (See it on YouTube here.)

Over at Think Progress, bloggers note that this kind of research has in fact led to advances in our understanding of autism. Meantime, Mike the Mad Biologist dug into the particular project Palin criticized, finding that it was for studying a type of fruit fly that was threatening olive groves needed to feed people.

Michael White at Adaptive Complexity takes the opportunity to write a post extolling the virtues of model org research. "One of the things budding geneticists, biochemists and cell biologists learn very quickly when they enter grad school is that studying humans is usually not the best way to successfully tackle the most interesting research questions," he writes.

There's been a lot of speculation about the composition of an Obama administration, but very little of what McCain's might look like. With this, we get a glimpse of who may be tapped for the FDA.