Time, Love , Memory

by Jonathan Weiner

  3 “Marxism may be discredited”: Ibid.

  4 Lewontin’s views: See R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); R. C. Lewontin, “The Dream of the Human Genome,” New York Review of Books 39, no. 10 (1992): 31–40; and R. Lewontin, Human Diversity (New York: Scientific American Books, 1982).

  “filled with the violence”: R. C. Lewontin, “Women Versus the Biologists: Review of Exploding the Gene Myth, by Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald, and Other Books,” New York Review of Book (April 7, 1994): 31–5.

  5 “a magnificent structure”: Wilson quotes this passage from Francis Bacon in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 23.

  6 “a more subdued draft”: S. Benzer to M. Delbrück, February 3, 1955, Caltech Archives.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE KNOT OF OUR CONDITION

  1 “The knot of our condition”: Pascal, Pensées, 36.

  had to be retracted: For a critical survey of the battlefield, see John Horgan, “Eugenics Revisited,” Scientific American (June 1993): 123–31.

  2 Dean Hamer: This summary of Hamer’s work is based on interviews with Hamer and on his own reports. See Dean H. Hamer et al., “A Linkage Between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual Orientation,” Science 261 (1993): 321–7; Stella Hu et al., “Linkage Between Sexual Orientation and Chromosome Xq28 in Males but Not in Females,” Nature Genetics 11 (1995): 248–6. For a popular account, see Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). See also their second book, Living with Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 1998).

  3 a social invention: Jonathan N. Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York, Dutton, 1995).

  “Drive out nature”: Horace, Epistles, I, x, 24; quoted by Voltaire in the entry on “Character” in his Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 1, Peter Gay, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 125.

  “we smoothe down”: Ibid.

  Twin studies: J. M. Bailey and R. C. Pillard, “A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48 (1991): 1089–96.

  brains of gay and straight men: Simon LeVay, The Sexual Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); S. LeVay and D. H. Hamer, “Evidence for a Biological Influence in Male Homosexuality,” Scientific American 270 (1994): 44–9.

  4 “Xq28—Thanks for the genes”: Hamer, Science of Desire, 21.

  a serious charge: Eliot Marshall, “NIH’s ‘Gay Gene’ Study Questioned,” Science 268 (1995): 1841.

  He was cleared: “No Misconduct in ‘Gay Gene’ Study,” Science 275 (1997): 1251.

  5 a gene called pollux: Shang-Ding Zhang and Ward F. Odenwald, “Mis-expression of the white (w) Gene Triggers Male-Male Courtship,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 92 (1995): 5525–9. with the headline wreathed in a circle: Larry Thompson, “Search for a Gay Gene,” Time (June 12, 1995): 60–1.

  “It’s completely silly”: John Travis, “Bisexual Bugs,” Science News 148 (1995): 13–14.

  6 a few of the stranger names: Nicholas Wade, “Now Playing at a Nearby Lab: ‘Revenge of the Fly People,’ ” New York Times (May 20, 1997): C1.

  7 a call from Israel: The report that resulted from that call is Jonathan Benjamin et al., “Population and Familial Association Between the D4 Dopamine Receptor Gene and Measures of Novelty Seeking,” Nature Genetics 12 (1996): 81–4. See also Hamer, “Thrills,” in Living with Our Genes, 27–54.

  8 Their behavior can be predicted: Jonathan Flint et al., “A Simple Genetic Basis for a Complex Psychological Trait in Laboratory Mice,” Science 269 (1995): 1432–5.

  9 “Maybe it is appropriate”: Natalie Angier, “Variant Gene Tied to a Love of New Thrills,” New York Times (January 2, 1996): A1.

  the pursuit of happiness: Klaus-Peter Lesch et al., “Association of Anxiety-related Traits with a Polymorphism in the Serotonin Transporter Gene Regulatory Region,” Science 274 (1996): 1527–31. Hamer wrote a commentary on that paper: “The Heritability of Happiness,” Nature Genetics 14 (1996): 125–6. See also Hamer, “Worry,” in Living with Our Genes, 55–86.

  10 “Everybody will be happier”: Quoted in Faye Flam, “Pursuing Key to Happiness, Researchers Look for Genes,” Philadelphia Inquirer (October 4, 1996): A1.

  She nurses them: Jon Cohen, “Does Nature Drive Nurture?” Science 273 (1996): 577–8. For a related story, see Robert M. Sapolsky, “The Importance of a Well-groomed Child,” Science 277 (1997): 1620–1.

  its whiskers are untrimmed: Nicholas Wade, “First Gene for Social Behavior Identified in Whiskery Mice,” New York Times (September 9, 1997): C4.

  One maggot, when it crawls: J. Steven de Belle, Arthur J. Hilliker, and Maria B. Sokolowski, “Genetic Localization of foraging (for): A Major Gene for Larval Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster,” Genetics 123 (1989): 157–63.

  11 A computer operator: Maurice Leroy, “Frenchman Is New Heir in Ethiopia,” Philadelphia Inquirer (November 29, 1996): A12.

  12 Today students of Silver’s: See J. L. Pierce et al., “A Major Influence of Sex-Specific Loci on Alcohol Preference in C57BL/6 and DBA/2 Inbred Mice,” Mammalian Genome 9 (1998): 942–48.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: PICKETT’S CHARGE

  1 “Human knowledge will be”: J. Henri Fabre, The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, John Elder, ed., Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 326.

  a fine fall afternoon: Saturday, October 29, 1994.

  2 dawn call from Stockholm: Wieschaus shared the 1995 prize with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Edward Lewis for their work on genes and development in fruit flies.

  3 “Molecular biology has no history”: Benno Müller-Hill, quoted in Sydney Brenner, “A Night at the Operon. Review of The lac Operon: A Short History of a Genetic Paradigm, by Benno Müller-Hill,” Nature 386 (1997): 235.

  4 “I hold the somewhat”: Ibid.

  “Much of what passes”: Wilson, Consilience, 182–3.

  “laid down”: Shine and Wrobel, Morgan, 2.

  use an electronic device: Tom Strachan et al., “A New Dimension for the Human Genome Project: Towards Comprehensive Expression Maps,” Nature Genetics 16 (1997): 126–32.

  5 “the climax of the climax”: George R. Stewart, Pickett’s Charge: A Micro-history of the Final Attack at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), ix.

  looking into the far future: Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon Books, 1997).

  “We have reached”: Wilson, Consilience, 277.

  6 “Nature uses only”: Quoted in Gleick, Genius, 13.

  7 visual awareness: Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); F. Crick, “Visual Perception: Rivalry and Consciousness,” Nature 379 (1996): 485.

  8 “If you will be”: Ibid.

  9 “no longer Gage”: Richard M. Restak, The Brain (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 147–9.

  blindsight: Jon H. Kaas, “Vision Without Awareness,” Nature 373 (1995): 195; Alan Cowey, “Blindsight in Real Sight,” Nature 377 (1995): 290–1.

  10 “if the atoms never swerve”: Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, book 2, lines 250–255, R. E. Latham, trans. (Penguin Books, 1994), 44.

  11 “by incontrovertible direct experience”: Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 92.

  “and that what seems”: Ibid., 95. Compare Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.)

  “Nor will there ever be”: Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 96. Benzer marked this line when he read What Is Life? as a young physicist.

  “A human behavior pattern”: Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), 9–10.

  “Diversity is as wide”: Pascal, Pensées, 19:5.

  12 “Thoughts come at random”: Ibid., 190.

  “Thoughts come into”: Emerson, “The O
ver-Soul,” in Essays and Lectures, 395.

  “I am lying in bed”: William James, Talks to Teachers, Chapter 15, “The Will,” in Bruce Kuklick, ed., Writings 1878–1899 (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 810–11.

  “The grand edifice of Science”: Max Delbrück, “Homo Scientificus According to Beckett,” in W. Beranek, ed, Science, Scientists, and Society (New York: Bogden and Quigley, 1972).

  13 And in the tree of life: This paragraph grew out of a conversation I had with the writer Lawrence Weschler, who mused about the fractal similarity of the branches.

  “The things we thought”: Euripides, “The Bacchae,” in The Bacchae and Other Plays, Philip Vellacott, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1954), 228.

  14 “Unless one understands the elements”: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, Marjorie Kerr Wilson, trans. (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), xi.

  scribbled in his draft: R. J. Greenspan, J. C. Hall, and T. Tully, Genes and Behavior: A New Synthesis, draft of a book for Princeton University-Press, 1995.

  “the great parliament of instincts”: Lorenz, On Aggression, 81.

  15 “What is your aim in philosophy?”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958 [1953]), 309.

  “like crack through cup”: Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” in Duino Elegies, J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, trans. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 71.

  “Who’s turned us around”: Ibid.

  the same with consciousness: Several philosophers see hints in that direction. See, e.g., Daniel C. Dennett, “Our Mind’s Chief Asset: Review of Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again,” Times Literary Supplement (May 16, 1997): 5.

  “Denmark’s a prison”: W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, in Comedies and Tragedies, vol. 2, 617.

  Acknowledgments

  In 1991, a team of biologists took a gene from one species and transferred it to a second. When I read the report in the journal Science, the experiment interested me because it was quirky: the animals were flies, and the gene changed the flies’ sense of time. The experiment also interested me because it opened possibilities that I had assumed—that most of the world had assumed—still lay far ahead in the third millennium.

  In the spring of 1994, I had lunch with Ralph J. Greenspan, who is now at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. Talking with Greenspan led me to his former teacher Jeff Hall of Brandeis, one of the authors of the report. Talking with Hall led me to his former teacher Seymour Benzer, whose experiments in a Fly Room at Caltech had opened what Benzer called the genetic dissection of behavior. By then I understood that the study of genes and behavior was further along than I had imagined and that the approach Benzer had started—genetic dissection, starting with single genes and working up to behavior—was a tradition of science that would soon be better known. Other studies of behavior worked from the outside in; Benzer and his students worked from the inside out. They had been doing this work ever since the 1960s, and yet until I read that report in Science I had been unaware of the genetic dissection, of behavior.

  At first, I planned to write a book centered on that single experiment. My working title was A Sense of Time. But the more I learned, the more I realized that the story really began at the turn of the twentieth century. The school that Benzer started is part of a tradition that has been separate from psychology, ethology, and other schools of behavior in the twentieth century, and is likely to transform the study of behavior in the twenty-first. So the scope of the book widened and the research lengthened until my working title began to take on some uncomfortable ironies.

  Ralph Greenspan, Jeff Hall, and Seymour Benzer were extremely generous with their time and hospitality. It is a pleasure to be able to thank each of them here for all the help they gave me while I was writing this book.

  After my first year of research, Richard Preston put me in touch with people at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I could not have finished the book without their support. Many thanks to Doron Weber of the foundation for his interest and encouragement.

  At Princeton University, Arnie Levine welcomed me into the Department of Molecular Biology as a Visiting Fellow in 1995, and, as my project lengthened, he allowed me to stay on through 1997. Friends there helped me observe one of the world’s leading centers for the study of molecular biology. They put me in the center of things and arranged for me to meet over lunch and dinner with other molecular biologists who were passing through. Special thanks to Alice Lustig, Charles Miller, Tom Shenk, Tom Silhavy, Lee Silver, Shirley Tilghman, Tom Vogt, Evelyn Witkin, and the president of the university, Harold Shapiro. Thanks also to the undergraduate students in Lee Silver’s lab, Class of ’95.

  Shirley Tilghman invited me to teach a writing seminar at Princeton in the spring of 1998, while I was finishing this book. The course allowed me to put together some ideas about writing and science that I had been thinking about for a long time and had been working through, indirectly, with this story. Thanks to Carol Rigolot of the Council for the Humanities for making the course happen.

  First Louise Schaeffer and then Nancy Van Doren at Princeton’s Biology Library forgave my erratic sense of time. Judith Goodstein of Caltech’s Institute Archives was also helpful. Jeff Cramer of the Boston Public Library went beyond the call of duty.

  Besides my dozens of hours of interviews with Benzer, I drew on a long unpublished interview that had been conducted by Heidi Aspaturian of Caltech. That oral history was invaluable to me in writing this book. I also drew on unpublished interviews conducted by Garland Allen with Alfred Sturtevant, Carolyn Harding with Max Delbrück, and Horace Freeland Judson with Benzer. I thank them for allowing me to quote from portions of those interviews. Yoshiki Hotta was kind enough to record and send me an oral history of his time in the Benzer lab.

  In all, I interviewed nearly 150 biologists, too many to thank here by name. Besides Benzer, Greenspan, and Hall, those who spoke with me at length over many interviews include Steven Helfand, Charabambos Kyriacou, Michael Rosbash, Lee Silver, Tim Tully, and Michael Young. A number of people were particularly helpful in laying out the terrain, including Michael Ashburner, Howard Berg, Sydney Brenner, Francis Crick, Martin Heisenberg, Eric Kandel, Ed Lewis, James Watson, Eric Wieschaus, and E. O. Wilson. Also helpful were historians of biology, including Garland Allen, Angela Creager, Daniel J. Kevles, and Jane Maeinschein. Robert Kohler’s history of early fly work, Lords of the Fly, was good reading, and gave me ideas for a few of my book’s illustrations.

  For many different kinds of help, thanks to Neil Beach, Barbie Benzer, Anthony Bonner, Manny Delbrück, Karen Fahrner, David Fleischer, Bob Freidin, Burt Hall, Sue Judd, Carolynne Lewis-Arevalo, Monika Magee, James McPherson, Rosie Mestel, Beth Panzer, Rabbi Sandy Parian, Pam Polloni, Richard Rhodes, James Shreeve, Barbara Smith, Norma Deupree Sperry, Rabbi Shira Stern, and the staff of Paganini Ristorante and Cafe. Special thanks to Kathy Robbins.

  Benzer volunteered to read the manuscript. So did Reb Brooks, Ralph Greenspan, Jeff Hall, Don Herzog, David and Mair La Touche, Laurie Miller, Chip Quinn, Michael Rosbash, Keith Sandberg, Lee Silver, Shirley Tilghman, Tim Tully, and Mike Young. Some of them read more than one draft, and they made many useful comments, suggestions, and corrections. Greenspan pulled an all-nighter. Benzer and Hall read the galleys. John Tyler Bonner read every draft, always with that combination of enthusiasm and levelheadedness that is cherished by his worldwide circle of friends.

  Many thanks once again to my agent, Victoria Pryor, and my editor, Jon Segal, who had more patience and more faith in me and in my project than I did myself. Thanks to Ida Giragossian and Michael Rockcliff at Knopf.

  I thank my friends and family for helping me clarify my thoughts about genes and behavior and for reminding me that there are other ways of looking at life too. Aaron and Benjamin talked over the project during family dinners and waited patiently when it got in the way of family adventure
s.

  My wife, Deborah Heiligman, was more enthusiastic about this one than about any of my other books. During the last stretch, when I often worked through the night, she slept in my study to keep me company, though her own writing sometimes suffered in the morning. This book would not have been what it is without her help.

  Time, love, memory, as seen through a compound eye.

  Illustration Credits

  1.1 After Niko Tinbergen, “Social Releasers and the Experimental Method Required for Their Study,” Wilson Bulletin 60 (1948): 6–52.

  2.1 Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library.

  2.2 From T. H. Morgan, “Localization of the Hereditary Material in the Germ Cells,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences I (1915): 420–29.

  2.3 Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library.

  2.4 Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library.

  3.1 Courtesy of Seymour Benzer.

  Courtesy of Seymour Benzer.

  3.2 Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

  3.3 Courtesy of Seymour Benzer.

  3.4 Courtesy of Seymour Benzer.

  4.1 Courtesy of Manny Delbrück.

  4.2 Courtesy of Ross Madden, Black Star, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

  4.3 Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

  4.4 From Seymour Benzer, “Genetic Fine Structure,” Harvey Lectures (1960): 1–21.

  4.5 Courtesy of Seymour Benzer.

  6.1 Courtesy of the Cajal Institute.

  6.2 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 120.

  6.3 Courtesy of Seymour Benzer.

  7.1 Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library.

  7.2 Courtesy of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

  7.3 From T. H. Morgan, C. B. Bridges, and A. H. Sturtevant, “The Genetics of Drosophila,” Bibliographia Genetica 2 (1925): 1–262.