Genetics research fly room. Flies in vials in the 'fly room' at Columbia University, New York, USA. Drosophila fruit flies are used in genetic research. This photograph is thought to date from around 1920. It is from the papers of German-US geneticist Curt Jacob Stern (1902-1981), who worked at Cornell in the 'fly room' of US geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945). Stern published on the genetics of Drosophila fruit flies, used as a model organism to study changes and mutations in genetics. The work carried out here resulted in Morgan's chromosome theory for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933.