Science, schmience, part 2

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s policy speech on special needs children today featured this shockingly ignorant statement:

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.

As Think Progress notes, fruit fly research has a lot to do with the public good:

Palin did not specify what fruit fly research earmark she was referring to (presumably a grant for olive fruit fly research), but she is apparently unaware that scientific research with fruit flies has led to valuable discoveries that have boosted autism research, as a study at the University of North Carolina demonstrated last year:

[S]cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly.

The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.

The study of fruit flies has also been used for other autism research and “revolutionize[d]” the study of birth defects.

Here’s a summation from Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe from Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight:

I’m going to be as restrained and measured as I possibly can about this. This is the most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment that we have seen from Gov. Palin so far, and there’s been a lot of competition for that prize. Fruit flies are … a standard scientific model in genetic research along with a whole range of other organisms and cells, including mice, rats. … There’s nothing fluffy or funny about it.