Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior is a book by American non-fiction writer Jonathan Weiner, published in 1999. The book is a biography of California Institute of Technology biologist Seymour Benzer, who is recognized as one of the pioneers of genetics and molecular biology. The book received mostly positive reviews, with critics noting its scientific accuracy and that it is about a "fascinating history". Reviews by the biologists, noted that Weiner "never really attempts a critical evaluation of what fruitflies have contributed to our understanding of behavior", and criticized the portrayal of Max Delbrück in the book; however, all the critics were very positive in their reviews.
Synopsis Benzer started his career at Purdue University as a graduate student in solid state physics, studying semiconductors. His work in the early 1940s contributed to the subsequent development of the transistor. In 1946, he read Erwin Schrodinger's highly influential book What Is Life?, which described the nature of genes as known in the 1940s as "the great unsolved mystery of biology". Inspired by the book, Benzer enrolled in the summer course organized by Max Delbrück at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. After the course Benzer decided to change his career and became a biologist. For the next several years he worked with Delbrück and his phage group, and Andre Lwoff, Francois Jacob, and Jacques Monod at the Pasteur Institute. Later Benzer returned to Purdue. In classical genetics the gene was thought to be an indivisible entity; Benzer realized that if Watson and Crick's DNA model was correct, "then each gene is not a mathematical point but a linear segment, and that crossing-over should be able to occur within a gene." Benzer spent the next 10 years studying the rII region of phage mutants, as it was found to be very suitable and "an extraordinarily sensitive and simple assay" for detection of rare crossing-over events in a gene. When this field of study became more popular, Benzer abandoned it and started to work on a completely new area; that was very characteristic of Benzer throughout his career.
Benzer was interested by how different the personalities of his two daughters were. As the environment was the same, he reasoned that the cause should be in the genes. He chose Drosophila as his model organism. In his 1967 paper in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, "Behavioral mutant of Drosophila isolated by countercurrent distribution", he showed "that one can treat a fly as an 'atom of behavior' and profoundly change its behavior by introducing single-gene mutations". Benzer worked with flies from 1967 to 1980. The book is focused on three of the most specific types of mutants found during this period: "'Time' mutants that have an altered circadian clock, 'Love' mutants that are unable to perform the fly's intricate courtship behavior properly, and 'Memory' mutants that are unable to learn or remember." As summarized in The New York Times review:
Benzer [...] studied time, love and memory in fruit flies to see how genes govern behavior. Fruit flies wake up at dawn and go to sleep at night even when they are in a sealed room and never see the sun. Fruit flies also have elaborate courtship rituals and mating behavior: love. And surprisingly, experiments [...] have proved that flies can learn, for example, how to avoid electric shocks. That is, they have memory.
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