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Walk through the paint-chipped double doors and down the tiled hallway, hang a right, and there's the lab. Stacked on tables are wire racks holding small vials shaped like milk bottles. Each vial, stoppered with cotton, contains a smear of molasses mixed with cornmeal. In a few days, wormy new life will squirm inside: maggots.

This lab at Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio, is one of the largest suppliers of a crucial resource for genetic scientific research: fruit flies, aka drosophila. Each year, Bowling Green's National Drosophila Species Resource Center ships millions of the flies to researchers worldwide. What makes the lowly fruit fly the belle of the genetic research ball? They live fast. Flies blitz through a full life cycle - from egghood to maggothood to parenthood - in about 20 to 30 days. A researcher needs just a few months to study generations of fruit flies. Such research, moreover, has yielded some pretty amazing discoveries about humans, whose genes are startlingly similar to the fly's genes.

We at Fast Company decided to conduct our own experiment. We wondered whether there's a human equivalent of drosophila in the world of work - people who catch on quicker and accomplish more than the rest of us; people who cycle through projects and jobs at warp speed, adding new skills by the score to their portfolios. After our own thorough (though admittedly less-than-scientific) research, we think we've found them. Check out our lab reports, and you'll find that these rapidly evolving creatures disprove some of the standard hypotheses about managing your life's work.

Hypothesis: A demotion is acutely toxic to your career.

Subject: Steve Tobak, 41, vice president of corporate marketing and communications at National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara, California

Career DNA: Tobak has lived multiple lives during his 18-year career. He morphed from an engineer into a salesman, then into a manager, and then again into a marketer. He's worked for six companies during that time, relentlessly building new skills to beef up his portfolio. Past employers have included Cyrix Corp., NEC, and Texas Instruments. But Tobak says that smart career management isn't about moving often - it's about moving wisely.

"If you're a candidate for the executive ranks, a smart company will move you all over the organization, so you'll learn the diverse set of skills that will prepare you to lead," he says. "I liked that idea of grooming - but I wanted to learn faster than a single company would let me."

Observation: In 1990, Tobak hopped several rungs down the career ladder. He left his job as a marketing director at United Silicon Structures, a chip manufacturer, where he had called the shots for both product development and promotion, to become a solo salesman for Competitive Technology Inc., a Costa Mesa, California-based company that represents chip makers. At first, he thought that Competitive Technology's offer was lame. Why give up $20,000 worth of stock and a six-figure salary for a straight- commission job?

"I wondered what my mom would think of me throwing out my master's degree in engineering and 10 years of management experience to become a salesman," he recalls. "It was a step down, but it was a step that I needed to take. I was clueless about how to handle people in a sales environment. And I realized that selling is a huge part of what any successful executive does."