 The phenomenon of synthetic lethality was first described by Calvin Bridges in 1922, who noticed that some combinations of mutations in the model organism "Drosophila melanogaster" confer lethality.Theodore Dobzhansky coined the term "synthetic lethality" in 1946 to describe the same type of genetic interaction in wildtype populations of "Drosophila".If the combination of genetic events results in a non-lethal reduction in fitness, the interaction is called synthetic sickness.