Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behaviour (1999) 1/11/05. Reviewed by Jon Turney Jonathan Weiner profiles Seymour Benzer, one of the Lords of the Fly.

Sometimes the best way into the science is through a close look at the work of a single scientist. You just have to choose the right one. Jonathan Weiner chose brilliantly for his fine book about the genetics of behaviour in fruit flies. Seymour Benzer has never sought the limelight, but his career is as compelling as any biologist of the last half-century.

Benzer trained as a physicist, then pioneered real gene mapping using the minute almost-organisms called bacteriophages. This was a heroically detailed endeavour, which showed that it really was possible to track genes to particular stretches of a length of DNA. But it was only the start of Benzer's contribution. The phage was the lab rat of early molecular biology because of its simplicity, but by the 1960s he had had enough of working with a beast whose entire behaviour consisted of entering a bacterium and reproducing itself in large numbers.

To go further he switched, not to rats, but to the organism best-loved of the very first serious geneticists in the early decades of the 20th century, the fruit fly. Flies are still pretty simple in some ways. But they can do things like moving towards the light, mating, learning to avoid nasty things and following a daily cycle of activity.

Benzer wanted to know what role genes played in these varied aspects of fly behaviour, so he and his students set about finding ways to measure them experimentally. Then they isolated mutant flies – ones with no sense of direction, which could not tell the time or did not know who to mate with. All turned out to have genetic alterations that could be located in the already mapped set on the fly's chromosomes.

The intricacies of the fly's behaviour are worth knowing about because studies like this are the foundation for interpreting the human genome. Benzer's idea was that "behaviour is the way the genome interacts with the outside world". In some cases, the same genes will operate in humans. But there will still be a lot of hard thinking needed to fathom how the relatively simple links between genes and behaviour in the fly relate to the much more complex behaviours of Homo sapiens, even if they sometimes have the same names.

Weiner makes this point too, though not until the end of the book. The rest is caught up in the successes of Benzer's fly experiments, and paints an enticing picture of how an unusually talented and determined researcher can switch fields and take on a problem no one else thinks is worth working on yet. Along the way, he trained a whole gang of students who took the work out into other labs. And, as long as they could cope with Benzer's preference for working from noon until the small hours of the morning, and his penchant for cooking unusual animals for lab snacks, it sounds as if they all had a lot of fun.

Book details

Hardcover 320 pages (June 7, 1999)
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Language: English
ISBN: 0571196322