This post is from April 2007. Facts and links may have changed since. See more from that month

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Science, Sex, Superflies

So reads the apparently unironic headline on the IAEA website detailing regional efforts to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly.

Apparently, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have a cooperative program using nuclear science to breed sterile male fruit flies, air-dropping seven million of them at a time.

Now, I don’t want to tell the IAEA how to do its job, but clearly we have the wrong 1970s blaxploitation reference.

Superfly? Why breed seven million superflies when all it takes is a single John Shaft fruit fly?

Jeffrey Lewis

Writing on ACW 2004–2026

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk.com. He is the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. His also a non-resident affiliate at Stanford's Center for Security and International Cooperation and a Contributing Editor to Survival.

All posts by Jeffrey Lewis