The Fly Room

"[The Fly Room] offers a dynamic and collective biography of several key architects of the Modern Synthesis, set against a scientific and political backdrop shaped by the rise of the 'reform' eugenics movement...[T]he book examines Darwinism, eugenics, and 'Lysenkoism' not as isolated issues but as interconnected facets of the broader nature/nurture debate of the 20th century."—Francesco Cassata, University of Genoa

"[This] book offers an empathic, deeply personal, reading of major achievements in human genetics based on the author’s extensive archival research. The breadth of historical material is impressive and so is the author’s knowledge of the existing scholarship on the history of science, genetics, Darwinism, and eugenics, to which he too has contributed significantly for the past two decades."—Marius Turda, Oxford Brookes University