Seymour Benzer

Behavioral geneticist, molecular biologist, and physicist

• Born: October 15, 1921
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: November 30, 2007
• Place of death: Pasadena, California

A pioneer in the field of neurogenetics, Benzer used viruses to map genes, showing the connection between molecular biology and genetics. His research with the Drosophila fly showed how genes control behavior.

Early Life

Seymour Benzer (BEHN-zur) was born to parents who had immigrated from Poland in 1910 and who both worked in the clothing industry. Benzer was the third of four children. When Benzer was age four, the family moved to Brooklyn, where he went to a Jewish school until he had his Bar Mitzvah. He did not have strong religious convictions, but he went to the synagogue out of respect for his parents. There he would place a physics book on top of the Torah. His education was in a public elementary school and New Utrecht High School. His parents worked late into the night to pay the bills, and there was no extra money for college. Benzer had been interested in biology for several years. He had dissected frogs in the laboratory in the basement of his home. When his uncle gave him a microscope as a Bar Mitzvah gift, it opened up new worlds for Benzer. A Regents Scholarship of five hundred dollars a year allowed Benzer to start Brooklyn College in 1938. At Brooklyn College, he majored in physics because he did not want to take biology courses. He graduated in January, 1942, and married his girlfriend of four years, Dorothy Vlosky, in an Orthodox ceremony. The newlyweds boarded a train the night of the wedding, bound for Purdue University in Indiana, where Benzer would attend graduate school.

Life’s Work

Soon after starting graduate school, Benzer became involved in a secret project for the government, dealing with radar. His work earned him a military deferment. The crystals used in radar as detectors at that time would often burn out because of the high voltage. He developed a germanium-doped crystal that would detect the microwave signal and not burn out. After the war, the research group turned its information over to Bell Laboratories, where Benzer’s information was used to create a transistor.

He received his Ph.D. in 1947 and was hired by Purdue as an assistant professor in the physics department. During this time, he became interested in the mapping of genes on chromosomes and attended a summer course at Cold Spring Harbor, spent a year at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, two years at the California Institute of Technology, and a year at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, learning about gene mapping and bacteriophage. When he returned to Purdue, Benzer selected a virus that would not infect the strain of Escherichia coli called K, because it was a defective mutant of the gene. By infecting bacteria repeatedly, some of defective genes combined to produce a virus that could infect the E. coli K strain. The new gene had pieces of both of the original genes. His experiments proved that genes are not one indivisible piece but are made of many small pieces. By looking at the mutant combinations and the length of the pieces of the gene, he built a map of the rII gene that was large enough to see the difference of one nucleotide. Part of his work was used later by Francis Crick to determine that the codon in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) contains three nucleotides.

In 1967, Benzer moved to the California Institute of Technology and began using the Drosophila fly to study how genes determine behavior. Selecting flies and creating mutants that behaved strangely, Benzer began to locate the gene responsible for particular behavior. He identified genes linked to memory, internal clocks, courting, learning, and aging, among others. In a collaboration experiment, the fly antibodies reacted with some human tissue, indicating that some of the genes are the same. In 1978, his wife died of breast cancer; later, he met and married Carol Miller, a neuropathologist. Benzer died of a stroke in Pasadena, California, at the age of eighty-six.

Significance

Benzer was a pioneer in the field of mapping genes before the DNA double helix was established. His work in molecular biology and in genetics attracted many scientists to that field. When the field became crowded with researchers, he changed fields. A pioneer in neurogenetics, Benzer led many scientists to look at the relationship between genes and behavior. The relationship is studied for links to diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Other studies involve alcoholism, aging, and drug addiction.

Bibliography

Benzer, Seymour. “The Fine Structure of the Gene.” Scientific American 206 (January, 1962): 70-84. Benzer explains the results of his research into genes.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Interview with Seymour Benzer. Interview by Heidi Aspaturian. Pasadena, Calif.: California Institute of Technology Archives, 2002. Benzer recounts his life story, with many amusing tales, in this interview conducted in eleven sessions between September, 1990, and February, 1991.

Holmes, Frederic Lawrence. Reconceiving the Gene: Seymour Benzer’s Adventure in Phage Genetics. Edited by William C. Summers. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. This technical biography covers the first part of Benzer’s career, up to the mid-1960’s.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Seymour Benzer and the Definition of the Gene.” In The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution: Historical and Epistemological Perspectives, edited by Peter J. Beurton, Raphael Falk, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Describes Benzer’s role in advancing science’s understanding of genes.

Weiner, Jonathan. Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. New York: Knopf, 1999. A thorough biography of Benzer that also explores the field of molecular biology, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.