Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior - Softcover

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Jonathan Weiner is one of the most distinguished popular-science writers in the country: his books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Time, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and many other newspapers and magazines, and he is a former editor at The Sciences. He is the author of The Beak of the Finch; Long for This World; His Brother's Keeper; The Next One Hundred Years; and Planet Earth. He lives in New York, where he teaches science writing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

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Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch, brings his brilliant reporting skills to the story of Seymour Benzer, the Brooklyn-born maverick scientist whose studies of genetics and experiments with fruit fly genes have helped revolutionize our knowledge of the connections between DNA and behavior -- both animal and human.

How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer's Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer and his associates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific detective story, Time, Love, Memory forcefully demonstrates how Benzer's studies are changing our world view -- and even our lives.

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"A fascinating history--. Literate and authoritative--.Marvelously exciting." --"The New York Times Book Review
Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch, brings his brilliant reporting skills to the story of Seymour Benzer, the Brooklyn-born maverick scientist whose study of genetics and experiments with fruit fly genes has helped revolutionize or knowledge of the connections between DNA and behavior both animal and human.
How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer's Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer, and his asssociates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific detective story, Time, Love, Memory forcefully demonstrates how Benzer's studies are changing our world view--and even our lives.

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Seymour Benzer's Laboratory runs along two corridors of Church Hall at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. His private workroom is at the corner where the corridors meet. Here he keeps his own tools and trophies, and an owl's hours. It is a windowless room lined with plastic bins that Benzer labeled decades ago in his spidery black script: Lenses, Mirrors, Needles, Wires, Pencils, Switches, Toothpicks, Pipe Cleaners, anything and everything he might need for an experiment in the middle of the night, including Teeth (Human and Shark).

The old gray benchtop is all test tubes and bottles: mostly standard-issue laboratory stock, but here and there a half-pint milk bottle with heavy scratched glass and antique advertising ("5 cents--Just a Little Better") stoppered with a foam-rubber cork. These tubes and bottles hold a sampling of the thousands of mutants that Benzer and his students, his students' students, and his competitors have engineered.

The mutants are fruit flies, and their mutations have changed their
behavior. One of them is timeless, a clock mutant. In a windowless room like this one, the fly seems to wake and sleep at random intervals, as if it has broken its covenant with day and night, so that day and night will not come at their appointed time. Another is dissatisfaction, a female mutant that does not like males and keeps flicking them away with her wings. Then there is pirouette, which moves at first in big arcs, then in smaller and smaller arcs, like certain problems in science, turning at last on a single point, until it sometimes starves to death.

In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal looked up at the night sky and then looked down at a mite, picturing "legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in the veins, humors in the blood, drops in the humors, vapors in the drops," and onward and downward to the atoms. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread," he wrote. He meant two infinite spaces, which he called the two infinites of science, one above and around him, the other below and inside him. Of the two infinites, the space that frightened him more was the space that he could not begin to see, the stardust of atoms that made up his very thoughts and fears and moved the fingers around his pen. "Anyone who considers himself in this way will be terrified at himself."

The twentieth century was a long spiral inward on Pascal's path, beginning with a single mutant fly in a milk bottle in the century's first years, and reaching the atoms that Pascal dreaded to see near the century's close. If the spiral leads where it now promises or threatens to lead, this may be remembered as one of the most significant series of discoveries since science began, matching or surpassing the discoveries of twentieth-century physics. In the universe above and around us, physics opened new views of space and time; in the universe below and inside us, biology opened first glimpses of the foundation stones of experience: time, love, and memory.

What are the connections, the physical connections, between genes and behavior? What is the chain of reactions that leads from a single gene to a bark, or a laugh, or a song, or a thought, or a memory, or a glimpse of red, or a turn toward a light, or a raised hand, or a raised wing? The first scientists to look seriously at this question were the revolutionaries who figured out what genes are made of atom by atom--the founders of the science now known as molecular biology. Seymour Benzer was one of those revolutionaries, and he and his students took the enterprise farthest. Benzer's work on the problem was quiet, his students' work was quiet, and their story has never been told. But to a large extent the hard science of genes and behavior came out of their fly bottles. In this sense the fly bottle is one of the most significant legacies that the science of the twentieth century bequeaths to the twenty-first, a time, love, memory great gift and disturbance that human knowledge conveys to the night thoughts and day-to-day life of the third millennium. Pascal quoted Saint Augustine: "The way in which minds are attached to bodies is beyond our understanding, and yet this is what we are."


From a shelf in his workroom, Benzer takes down a dusty set of test tubes. They are bound together in such a way that he can slide one test tube mouth to mouth with another test tube, like one cup lidding another, to form a series of sealed glass tunnels. They look something like panpipes. The design is so simple that the first model he built back in the 1960s still works. Now the London Science Museum has a replica, and someone from the San Francisco Exploratorium wants to automate one so that it will cycle through its paces over and over inside a glass display case.

Benzer dusts off the test tubes and lays them down flat on the benchtop before him. Then he lays a dim fluorescent bulb of fifteen watts on the far side of the benchtop. When he switches off the overhead lights, the fluorescent bulb glints on the test tubes and gleams on his reading glasses. The rows of bottles and bins, the stacks of books and manuscripts drop halfway into shadow. The light just catches the outlines of an ammonite propped against the far wall; a fossil shell the shape of a coiled elephant's trunk; and a row of trilobites, stone fossils with bulbous eyes. In the far corner of the sanctum a human brain sits in the dark. Benzer keeps meaning to find a proper jar for the brain. He wants to put it on his desk as a memento mori or a memento vivere ("Remember to live"). The brain waits in a bucket of formaldehyde, and what is left of its spinal cord curls in the bottom of the bucket like the lifeline of an embryo.

Benzer got the idea for his panpipes one night in 1966, when he put two test tubes mouth to mouth to make one long tube with a single fruit fly trapped inside it. He turned out the light; he rapped the tubes on his benchtop to make the fly drop to the bottom; and he laid the tubes flat on the benchtop with the fly at one end of the tunnel and a small dim light at the other. Sitting in the shadows, he watched the fly in the tunnel move toward the light, just as he had expected it to do, because according to the textbooks a grown fruit fly in a dark place is attracted to light--so is a grown human being in a similar situation. The next fly also moved toward the light. But he was surprised to see that when he put a single fly through this simple trial a few times in a row, the fly did not always do the same thing. One fly raced to the light once, walked to it the next time, and then quit. Another fly ignored the light the first time and then raced for it at the next opportunity. Most flies did choose the light most of the time, but each trial seemed unpredictable.

In 1966 it was already clear that however else historians would remember the twentieth century, they would remember it for the discovery of the atomic theory of matter and the atomic theory of inheritance. Physicists and geneticists had developed both theories early in the century. At midcentury a small circle of young scientists, including Benzer and Francis Crick (both lapsed physicists) and James Watson (a lapsed ornithologist) had united the two theories. They discovered what genes are made of atom by atom--the double helix, the spiral staircase of DNA; they mapped the fine structure of the gene down to the level of its atoms; and they cracked the code in which the genetic messages are written. They now knew precisely what a gene is physically, although they did not know how to connect the details they were looking at, which were atomic, with the details of the living world that most interested them and interest all of us: hands, eyes, lips,...