Flies can be used to address a wide variety of problems in biology and medicine. The Fly Lab provides a resource not just to fly workers in Cambridge but elsewhere in the UK and Europe. This facility's manager Simon Collier believes that the facility can be especially helpful to research groups that are largely clinical but also want to incorporate the fly model into their research. A quick look at the website FlyBase gives a picture of the myriad ways in which the humble fruit fly is contributing to medical science. The Cambridge branch of FlyBase is headed by Professor Nick Brown who also leads a research lab in the Gurdon Institute. The Brown Lab uses Drosophila to investigate how bodies are built and how, during the development of an organism, cells attach to each other by means of ‘cell adhesion’. The processes which determine the growth of an adult organism from a single cell, the fertilised egg, are extremely complex and involve receptors known as ‘integrins’.