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With the discovery of the double helix a
generation ago, it was inevitable that we would ask new
questions about the origins of behaviour -- animal and human.
How much of our fate is decided before we are born? What
is written and in what code? What chain of reactions leads
from a twisted strand of DNA to a raucous laugh? To a thought?
To a memory? To a head turning toward the light? To the
habit of frowning? To a raised hand -- or a raised wing?
The man who has given us our first concrete
and often astonishing answers is the maverick scientist
Seymour Benzer -- one of the greatest biologists of the
century. His early work on the gene helped transform biological
research, and the experiments that he began at the California
Institute of Technology -- experiments that are, like Benzer
himself, at once whimsical, serious, and highly original
-- are now transforming the study of genes and behaviour.
In this book, Jonathan Weiner, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of one of the most admired and engaging
books about evolution, The Beak of the Finch, tells
the story of Benzer and his work.
Weiner spent almost five years in the Fly
Rooms of Benzer, his students and his colleagues, who are
coming closer and closer to the connection between genes
and behaviour by breeding mutant fruit flies. We watch over
the scientists' shoulders as they inject genes into fly
embryos with microsyringes to create lines of flies with
fast clocks and slow clocks (their hours of waking and sleeping
changed), flies with good and bad memories, flies with no
luck in love. We see that changing a single letter of genetic
code can change a fly's behaviour. And we see how many of
the genes that Benzer and his students have discovered in
flies are now showing up in worms, in mice, and in human
beings.
"If we hadn't done it" says Francis
Crick, "no one else would have done it." By breeding
generations of flies in fly bottles and conducting his experiments
with those tiny creatures, Seymour Benzer has changed the
way we think about behaviour, and about the cornerstones
of our experiences -- time, love, memory.
Jonathan Weiner worked as a writer and
editor at The Sciences. He is the author of Planet
Earth, The Next One Hundred Years, and The
Beak of the Finch, which won both the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. During the writing of
Time, Love, Memory he was Visiting Fellow in the
Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University,
and the McGraw Professor in Writing. He lives in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, with his wife and their two sons.
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