Time, love, memory: a great biologist and his quest for the origins of behavior

Abstract

The origin of the species was one of the great unanswered questions. Until Darwin. The origins of the universe and of life itself are fundamental questions still. But perhaps the most intimate, the most immediate, in some ways the most intricate and the most important question for our inquiring species, is the origin of behaviour. How much of our behaviour is passed down from one generation to the next? How much of our fate is decided before we are born? What is written and in what code and of what materials? This is the rich territory of Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory. In it we are allowed to look over the shoulders of Seymour Benzer at Cal Tech and the other great scientists who are building on their predecessors' work investigating the inheritance of behaviour in a remarkable new way. Nobody until Benzer had ever looked at the actual pieces of DNA that shape behavior and seen how they work. His breakthrough research involves the genes responsible for Time, Love and Memory - and the results of his attempt to draw a map of the genes will have a revolutionary effect on the conditions and the prospects of life itself. Very soon new tools to address anger, depression and mental illness will be at our disposal. And that is only the beginning.

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