Besides Dr Jekyll, humans cannot become something else after dinner. Bees can. Feed honeybee larvae some royal jelly, and they will grow into a larger, fertile and longer-lasting individual. It is no scoop. Scientists have known about it for over a century now. Nonetheless, it is a very thought-provoking notion for biologists - it means that a living being's fate can be quite dramatically altered depending on what it feeds upon, very early on in development. The systems we are most acquainted with have a strong genetic component; give us a gene, with an environment, and that will make you into a heavy-built, tall, bald or curly-haired person. But here is some jelly that will shape a bee's destiny. More specifically, there is a protein in the royal jelly that seems to be able to trigger off a series of metabolic processes in bee larvae, which will gradually turn them into queens. The protein has been baptized royalactin.
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