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Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior By Jonathan Weiner ( Vintage )
Release Date: 2000-04-04
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Product Description
"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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Amazon.com Review
In the words of Jonathan Weiner, "Time, love, and memory are ... three cornerstones of the pyramid of behavior." While some find it difficult to view humans as mere machines, molecular biologists maintain that most behavior is genetically based. Even skeptics and opponents agree that molecular biology may well change the way we all live in the 21st century. Little-known outside this exploding field, Seymour Benzer, his mentors, and his generations of students have studied the common fruit fly, Drosophila, and discovered genes that seem to have some influence upon our internal clock, our sexuality, and our ability to learn from our experiences. Weiner (whose last book, The Beak of the Finch, won a Pulitzer Prize) has written an affectionate history about the development of the science while offering charming glimpses of the people involved--trading haircuts to stretch their grant money in the early years, roaming the laboratory into the wee hours, naming the genes associated with learning after Pavlov's dogs. It's not all sweetness and light, however; ethical questions are raised, some of the hype (and hysteria) surrounding the human genome project is dissipated, and the complicated "clockwork" gene "looks less like an invitation to human intervention and more like a cautionary tale or object lesson for anyone who might try, in the 21st century, to improve on nature's four-billion-year-old designs." That said, the scientists in Weiner's tale reveal a very human side of this fast-moving science, and their belief that they'll find answers to important questions is contagious and compelling. As Benzer himself said, "It's a wonderful, fabulous world, and it's been kicking around a long time." --C.B. Delaney
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 Beautifully written, great storyteller ( dr_amygdala )
I was given this book, a young Biology student, by my Genetics unit professor in the basic Biology undergrad course. It was an experience to read. I would also recommend Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research to anyone who loves this book (or doesn't....) I personally enjoyed this book much more than The Beak of the Finch, which I could never finish.
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Hard to put down ( srdjan_miskovic )
"Time, Love, Memory" is a fascinating account of a group of scientists who pioneered the study of genes and behavior. It is also an interesting history lesson about the development of molecular biology and the development of science in general.
The atomic theory of inheritance - the idea that inherited characteristics are passed on as factors, as discrete units (now called genes) - began with the work of Gregor Mendel. Unfortunately, Mendel's work was largely ignored at the time of its initial publication. At the turn of the 20th century it was re-discovered and it ushered in a golden era of genetics (the period of classic genetics). This work was largely carried on in the United States by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his amazing group of undergraduate and graduate students (Morgan's raiders). Morgan's group found support for the Mendelian laws of inheritance in the breeding of common fruit flies (Drosophila). With the work of Morgan's group, it was discovered that Mendel's factors were arranged along chromosomes (`like beads on a string') and Morgan's student, Alfred Sturtevant, in one eureka moment, created the first ever genetic map of a chromosome. That is, Sturtevant figured out a way to map the order of genes along a chromosome and to calculate spatial distances between them.
However, it was still not known what genes were at the time (Morgan asked the question, `What are genes?' in his Nobel acceptance speech). While the function of genes as carriers of hereditary units was known, they were still abstract entities. The quantum physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, wrote a book called "What Is Life?" in which he tried to bring atomic physics to bear on the genetics problem. He speculated that the hereditary material might be carried in a crystal lattice structure and that genetic mutations might be quantum jumps. Schrodinger's speculations were beautiful, even if they mostly turned out to be wrong, but the book served as inspiration for a large group of physicists to become interested in biology and these physicists-turned-biologists would have a large role to play in the development of molecular biology.
One of these physicists-turned-biologists was Seymour Benzer. He had completed his doctoral thesis in physics at Purdue and was engaged in research on semi-conductors. With a very promising career in physics awaiting him, Benzer got interested in biology. "Within one day...he became instantly induced, transformed, determined and committed to be a biologist." Max Delbruck (another physicist-turned-biologist) became Benzer's mentor and they worked on bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). Around this time Crick and Watson (also inspired by Schrodinger's "What Is Life?") discovered the molecular structure of DNA. Benzer was aware of their work and he started to think about genes as rungs of nucleotides twisting along the DNA ladder. Benzer came up with a series of elegant, simple experiments to be performed with a mutant phage (rII phage) and with these experiments he became the first person to begin mapping the interior of a gene. These experiments earned him the nickname of the `atom-breaker of biology'. The Greek idea of the atom imagined it as a kind of tiny, indivisible spherical object. Similarly, many biologists thought of genes as being indivisible at the time, as abstract little beads lined up along the chromosome. But Benzer's work showed that the gene is divisible, that its interior can be mapped.
One might think that this alone would be more than enough to secure Benzer's place in the history of science. However, following his phage work, Benzer became increasingly interested in studying the genetic origins of behavior. He decided to use the Drosophila fly as the model organism, an entry point into the investigation of how genes lead to behavior. The atomic theory of behavior aimed to take apart the behavioral instincts and study their internal clockwork. At the time this was fringe science. As Benzer set up his fly room at Caltech, many people were highly skeptical about his intended research project. However, Benzer's ambitious project paid dividends and did so very early on. Benzer and his group of students injected Drosophila flies with mutagens and then screened them for a variety of behavioral mutations. The book focuses on three main discoveries that opened the way into the investigation of the genetic bases of the fundamental elements of the behavioral pyramid (time, love and memory).
Among these mutants there are flies with damaged internal clocks, whose behavioral rhythms become erratic, or slow, or fast. These various behaviors were found to be controlled by a period gene. Certain nucleotide repeats of the period gene exist in most animals, including humans. There are also flies with no luck in love, who exhibit abnormal courtship patterns. This led to the discovery of a gene called fruitless which controls the wiring of neurons in the fly brain that regulate mating behaviors. And finally, there are also flies who exhibit deficits in learning and memory, the so-called dunce mutants. These flies go on making the same mistakes, over and over again, due to a genetic mistake that interferes with one of their chemical signaling cascades.
Weiner's book is also a cautionary tale - there is all too often a tendency toward simplistic thinking about gene interactions in terms of a simple, linear model. As Weiner points out, "Every gene is a thread that leads into vast skeins of molecular anatomy, and one by one molecular biologists have discovered how easy it is to get lost at the very beginning of the thread." Discovering a gene is only the first step of discovery. Figuring out how it works is a much more complicated endeavor. Genes interact with one another via transcription factors (proteins regulating gene expression) and they also actively interact with the outside world and their operation is best conceived of in terms of massive networks, with each gene as something akin to a cog in a vast clockwork. This leads to complicated loops of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. Weiner's discussions of these issues are illuminating and by the end of the book the reader should understand why it is simply impossible to speak of `a gene' for such-and-such behavior. Behavior is almost always a complicated manner that is controlled by teams of genes.
Weiner's book is not a science book per se, but a book about science and an avant-garde group of scientists. It is scientific journalism at its best. He interweaves the book with quotes from Benzer, his students and other people in the field. Benzer's story is particularly interesting because he is not well known among the general public, despite his being a trailblazing scientist of the first class. At the time of writing the book Weiner was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton and over a four year span he interviewed about 150 biologists who were, in one way or another, involved in bridging the gap between molecular biology and the study of behavior. This means that he is able to bring a sense of intimacy to the book that makes it very difficult to put down. This is definitely a recommended read.
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 Cornerstones of Our Existence ( betty-lew )
Time is for clock. Since everything has a clockwork gene, I suppose that in humans it means the biological clock involving procreation and evolution. This book, written by a prize-winning biologist, is more about birds, flys, fish, plants, but hardly about men and women. Disappointed me -- a psychologist would have covered the behavior process for us, I guess. He relates how humpback whales (not males) sing songs which can radiate thousands of miles under the ocean and they change from season to season like the Top Ten Rock Tracks of Chuck's choices. They constantly change courtship songs but never repeat themselves. The songs are always new and never a 'golden oldie' from a decade or two back in time, as humans like to do. The nostalgia radio stations are the most popular now and have been for a long time.
Einstein asked this question, "How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as 'first love?' They don't. It does involve body chemistry and is a fleeting illusion as we seldom marry our first loves, or our last.
Proust said that memory is "a rope let down from heaven to draw us up out of the abyss of not-being." Memory involves happenings from our pasts and that of our ancestors. Here, again, the author used examples of frogs eyes and brains. Here I was, ready to learn about that elusive part of our existence, remembering, when all I find is that these are the cornerstones of our experience, time, love and memory. It's sad that as we age, memory is more fleeting than love. How could he forget so fast to find Sweet Surrender and probably didn't look at all, or his memory is worse than the flys and frogs and plants and things.
Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for 'The Beak of the Finch.' He dedicated this book to his brother, Eric. In his teaching fields, he went from biology to writing. Here, they gravitate from history or journalism to writing. First, you must know the fundamentals of writing for the general public and not textbook information for students before any kind of success is possible. It's okay, CS, we all forget sometimes.
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GOOD BYE TO JOHN DONNE AND ALL THAT? ( lloydamillionandtwo )
This is a very accessible blending of a biography of Seymour Benzer, the most renowned Drosophilist (fruit fly geneticist), with many anecdotes and quotations, and a fascinating history of fruit fly genetics and related molecular biology. However, I was brought up short by one passage in it, on page 244 -
"It is already possible - in fertility clinics it is done every day - to screen the DNA of a set of eight embryos at the eight-cell stage and let the parents pick the one they want to implant in the mother's womb. The more genes there are to screen and the better these gene complexes are understood, the more wealthy parents will select not only the healthiest but also the best and brightest embryo they can, designing the genes of their children....(O)ver the next few centuries whether governments legislate for or against it(,...t)he rich will pick and choose the genes of their children, the poor will not. The gap between rich and poor may widen so far in the third millennium that before the end of it there will not only be two classes of human beings but two species, or a whole Galapagos of different human species. These human species could be prevented from interbreeding by the genetic engineering of chemical incompatibility, so that the egg of one would reject the sperm of the other."
I can't help questioning Weiner's prediction that the wealthy will be able to select genes of their offspring while the poor will not "....over the next few centuries, whether governments legislate for or against it."
Toward the end of Marlon Brando's autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, that wise and wonderful man summed up his life's learning as attaining a visceral understanding of how much mankind is driven by group instincts, and how much every group requires outsiders to feel superior to. In the paragraph in Time, Love, Memory following the one quoted from above, Weiner quotes E.O. Wilson saying, "Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become....What lifts this question beyond mere futurism is that it reveals so clearly our ignorance of the meaning of human existence in the first place." At least, we know what John Donne's reply to Professor Wilson's musing would be.
Hopefully, there are Drosophilists looking for the genes whose sequences determine the proteins for the animal behaviors Brando referred to as "group instincts," and under what conditions their outsider-requiring aspects may be turned off, in order to ameliorate the dystopia of wealth-created castes to which we already belong as well as to prevent the potential dystopia of wealth-created species to which Weiner alludes. I'd call these our "Group-or-Gandhi" sequences, and as fine as this book is, I would have welcomed something in it about Drosophilists' thoughts about them.
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Incredible.
The most beautiful and inspiring nonfiction I've read. I intern in a molecular biology lab, so the science wasn't new to me. The story, however, was breathtaking. I've recommended this to many people--the same goes to you, Amazon reader!
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