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Alfred A. Knopf, 1999
Reviewed by
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Review
At mid-century, James Watson and Francis Crick announced that they had discovered the double helical structure of DNA. Understanding the code contained in that structure has already led to a revolution in science that in the next century is likely to bring unpredictable social changes. If pressed, most high school biology students probably can name Watson, a former student of ornithology, and Crick, a lapsed physicist. They might even be able to tell you the basic facts behind their amazing discovery. They would, however, be hard pressed to tell you much about Seymour Benzer, the subject of Jonathan Weiner's latest book, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. Yet Weiner makes a compelling case, in this well-researched and enjoyable book, that Benzer is one of those scientists whose name we ought to remember.
Benzer comes off as an idiosyncratic scientist and highly original thinker, one whose simple experiments help connect the dots between genes and behavior. Working peculiar shifts from midday until dawn, Benzer, his students, and his postdocs tease out the connections between genes and circadian rhythms, between mating rituals and learning, by studying the innumerable traits of the fruit fly. In Weiner's opinion, these discoveries have contributed to some of the most important, if muffled, cries of eureka in twentieth century biology. But Benzer's career trajectory was never linear, so Weiner's account of how his subject becomes one of the great minds in biology makes that part of the book particularly enjoyable.
Benzer began, not surprisingly, as a boy scientist with a microscope, in love with Sinclair Lewis' novel Arrowsmith and the purity of the protagonist's scientific quest. After graduating from Brooklyn College with a degree in physics in 1942, Benzer attended Purdue University as a graduate student and was immediately recruited for a secret wartime project involving radar.
After the war, Benzer began to think about the relationship between the atomic world in which he was working and the world of genetics. His curiosity took him to Cold Spring Harbor, where he began studying bacteriophages (just like Arrowsmith's protagonist), becoming, along with Max Delbruck, Watson, and others, the originators of a new science: molecular biology. He continued working at Purdue, ostensibly still a professor of physics, but actually concentrating on a particular mutation in the phage chromosome. He speculated that if crossing two mutant phages yielded healthy progeny, this would prove that the site of the chromosome crossover was the site where the gene had been split. If genes could be split like atoms, he reasoned, they could be dissected and opened wide for experimentation.
It wasn't until Benzer reached the California Institute of Technology, however, that his work in genetics accelerated. Once there, Benzer became interested not only in the stuff of which genes are made, but also in the way they affect behavior. He cast about for a model system, ruling out most animals because they reproduce too slowly. He eventually chose Drosophila melanogaster, the tiny, red-eyed fruit fly, and began his work on the atomic theory of behavior. He began by looking for mutant behaviors. His first great success came from his studies of "clock mutants," those flies whose circadian rhythms run slow, fast, or random compared to the norm. A graduate student, Ronald Konopka, eventually mapped the three different mutations associated with these traits to a locus on the X chromosome. The mutations occurred in a gene named "period."
The period gene, is, of course, the source of "Time" in the book's title. "Love" and "Memory" are the other two basic biological functions that Benzer continues to study, in a career that has so far spanned half a century. By looking at mutant flies whose behavior is out of sync, Benzer went on to map genes related to mating and learning.
An accomplished science writer, Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch in 1995. In his new book, he clearly shows a love for the subject and writes with great enthusiasm about it. For each discovery, he manages to convey fresh excitement, as if it had happened only a few hours, not decades, ago. The book is aimed at a scientifically sophisticated audience, but it would be unfair to say it is written solely for scientists. Weiner writes in an engaging manner and allows himself to speculate, with style, on larger questions in science.
He clearly describes experiments that will be unfamiliar to many of his readers. I had only one small complaint while reading Time, Love, Memory. I have never seen the "pan pipe" crosscurrent apparatus that Benzer constructed out of test tubes for one of his early Drosophila experiments, and I found myself wishing that Weiner had included a photograph of it along with those of Benzer and his colleagues that are sprinkled throughout the book.
Weiner spent five years working with Benzer and his colleagues to produce Time, Love, Memory. The book is nothing if not thorough. And while it is clear from the tone and title that Weiner reveres Benzer and his work, he does include the comments and views of Benzer's critics, some of them quite harsh. One is a former postdoc who says that Benzer doesn't stick with anything once others jump into the field. Another is a colleague who says that the genetic information gleaned from flies is worthless when it comes to applying it to human behavior.
Wiener excels at putting Benzer's story in context. He begins with a detailed account of Thomas Hunt Morgan's laboratory at Columbia University and his early studies of Drosophila and shows how Benzer and others have carried it forward. What began in the mid-1800s with Gregor Mendel and his wrinkled peas has come in the waning days of the twentieth century to genetic screening and the cloning of Dolly the sheep.
There is, Weiner points out, both potential evil and potential good in the science that drives the current fervor of genetic research. Early interest in heredity, he notes more than once, turned into a quest for eugenics in the early part of this century, a quest that ended in the ovens of Auschwitz. Where we will go with the knowledge we are now gaining so quickly - choosing the traits of our children, aborting "undesirable" fetuses - will be a major part of the ethical challenges we will face in the next century. The work that Benzer began in the dark, watching flies speed toward the light - for better or worse - remains one of the most influential contributions science has made in the twentieth century. And its legacy may be one of the most problematic for the twenty-first century.
Marla E. Cohen is a freelance writer living in Rockland County, New York. She has freelanced for several publications including Jewish Week, Sesame Street Parents, and Southern Living.
He was convinced that there must be genetic differences behind the innumerable quirks of our bodies and minds, and he was sure that these differences must matter at every turn of our behavior, at every one of our choice points. He wanted to find some of these genes and figure out how they make a difference. In those years these were new questions, and their strangeness attracted Benzer like filet of snake. He went into his new problem as if he were stepping into the dark, not sure how many steps there were or if there were any steps at all.
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Conversation with Jonathan Weiner - lengthy interview with the author, by the publisher. See also Of Protein Gears and Genetic Clocks, an Amazon.com interview.
Benzer Lab - includes a Quicktime video and links.
Electronic Desktop Project - educational application that allows you to play virtual scientist with Drosophila crosses.
History of Physics at Purdue: The War Period - a brief history of the physics department at Purdue, including Benzer's work there before he turned to molecular biology.
FlyBase - a comprehensive database for information on the genetics and molecular biology of Drosophila. FlyBase is a joint project with the Berkeley and European Drosophila Genome Projects. This site has been reviewed by HMS Beagle.
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