The passing of the last oracle: Adelaide Carpenter and Drosophila meiosis.

Professor Adelaide T. C. Carpenter passed away on May 31, 2024. She left behind a body of work that transformed meiotic biology in Drosophila. In the 1970s and 80s, Adelaide made truly fundamental contributions to meiosis, such as the discovery of the Recombination Nodule (RN) and, together with Bruce Baker, the isolation of a set of meiotic mutants that would become cornerstones of the next halfcentury of meiotic biology in Drosophila. Still, many of us may best remember Adelaide for her impact on our careers, her twenty-year presence at The Meiosis Gordon Conference, and an even longer tenure at the yearly Fly Meetings. She could often be found outside the meeting rooms chain smoking as she passed on the oral tradition of Drosophila chromosome biology and cytogenetics (known more affectionately as chromosome mechanics). She was the guardian of exactly how some of the older and more arcane experiments were carried out and of the theoretical underpinnings of the analysis of meiosis in Drosophila. (Indeed, she was the first of a very small number of people who really understood the complex definition of a precondition mutant).