Drosophila Melanogastronaut

Dr Erica McAlister examines the innocuous flies that are Drosophila melanogaster. They would be content to spend life doing nothing much more than hovering around a pile of rotting apples and getting drunk. But we now know more about these flies than any other animal on the planet, as a model for human biology and genetics - on earth and now in space.

With contributions from: behavioural geneticist Professor Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester; Dr Stephanie Mohr, Harvard University and author of First in Fly; Sharmila Bhattacharya, NASA's chief scientist for Space Biology.

Producer: Adrian Washbourne

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2021.