Seymour benzer biography of christopher

He looked at everything he could find under the microscope, including flies—never imagining the remarkable discoveries he would later make about the way their brains worked. With a Regents Scholarship to Brooklyn College inSeymour became the first in his family to go to college, where he studied physics. At college, Seymour met Dorothy Dotty Vlosky, a nursing student, and married her in Their wedding immediately preceded the couple's departure to Lafayette, Indiana, where Seymour was to continue his career as a graduate student in physics at Purdue.

At Purdue, Seymour joined the team of Karl Lark-Horovitz, which was then trying to find ways to make germanium semiconductors more reliable for radar, an important project during the war. At Purdue, Seymour came of age as a most remarkable scientist. He found that germanium crystals with trace amounts of tin were excellent rectifiers: conducting currents freely in one direction but resisting reverse flow without burning out even when sustained back voltages of more than volts were applied [ 2 ].

Several industrial laboratories went into commercial production after the war using Seymour's patents.

Seymour benzer biography of christopher: Benzer began by studying the

Ina year after Seymour's thesis defence, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley used these properties of germanium crystals to develop the first transistors at Bell Labs, for which they won the Nobel Prize. The emerging area of molecular genetics fascinated Seymour, and Lark-Horovitz was tremendously supportive of Seymour's desire to move into biology.

Though Seymour had good job prospects in several physics departments, Lark-Horovitz offered him an Assistant Professorship at Purdue and, helping him make the transition to biology, granted Seymour an immediate leave-of-absence to begin postdoctoral research in phage genetics. This leave, initially intended to be for one year, stretched to two, then three, and finally four as Seymour's fellowships were extended and re-extended, though the Dean of Science at Purdue was getting ready to fire him for continuous absence.

With additional sojourns at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Cold Spring Harbor, New York, this was also the period when Seymour got the best possible basic training in phage genetics. When he eventually did return to Purdue init took Seymour little more than a year before he found a problem that he could really sink his teeth into. He discovered a way to explore the physical nature of the gene.

This period of Seymour's research actually starts four decades earlier, when Alfred Sturtevant used the small fruit fly Drosophila to show that genetic factors map in a colinear array along chromosomes, based on the principle that the lower the frequency of recombination between them, the closer together the factors must be. But what, physically, was a gene?

Seymour benzer biography of christopher: Drawing on Benzer's record of

Was it made purely of nucleic acids, or was it part protein? Was it simply a linear stretch of DNA, or was it a globular bead? By what in retrospect seems clearly a case of a prepared mind recognising the significance of an accidental finding, Seymour found that a gene called r for rapid lysis in the bacteriophage T4 would allow him to answer these questions.

One day, while preparing for an upcoming teaching session, Seymour discovered that rII mutants failed to grow on a particular strain of bacteria that he had used. I thought I had forgotten to put the phage on there. Dummkopf, do it again! The figures on the blackboard show an estimate of the cost of sequencing the human genome. Mike Hengartnerand Bob Horvitz used C.

Students participants in the Urban Barcode Project describe their projects and reflect on the experience, including the challenges and rewards of doing independent student research. Benzer suddenly died of a stroke at 86 in November Related Content. Gallery Seymour Benzer, 1 Seymour Benzer in labcoat. Craig Venter Susan L. Lindquist Stanley B.

Brown G. David Tilman Teresa Woodruff. Pimentel Richard N. Zare Harry B. Marvel Frank H. Westheimer William S. Johnson Walter H. Stockmayer Max Tishler William O. Baker Konrad E. Bloch Elias J. Corey Richard B. Bernstein Melvin Calvin Rudolph A. Marcus Harden M. Roberts Ronald Breslow Gertrude B. Elion Dudley R. Herschbach Glenn T. Seaborg Howard E.

Simmons Jr. Cram Norman Hackerman George S. Hammond Thomas Cech Isabella L. Karle Norman Davidson Darleane C. Hoffman Harold S. Johnston John W. Cahn George M. Whitesides Stuart A. Rice John Ross Susan Solomon. Baldeschwieler Ralph F. Hirschmann Ernest R. Somorjai John I. Brauman Stephen J. Lippard Tobin J. Marks Marvin H. Caruthers Peter B.

Dervan Mostafa A. Benkovic Marye Anne Fox. Barton Peter J. Stang Allen J. Bard M. Frederick Hawthorne Judith P. Klinman Jerrold Meinwald Geraldine L. Richmond A. Paul Alivisatos R. Lawrence Edwards. Draper Othmar H. Ammann Hugh L. Dryden Clarence L. Johnson Warren K. Lewis Claude E. Shannon Edwin H. Land Igor I. Sikorsky J. Presper Eckert Nathan M.

Newmark Jack St. Clair Kilby. Mueller Harold E. Edgerton Richard T. Leith Raymond D. Mindlin Robert N. Noyce Earl R. Parker Simon Ramo. Heinemann Donald L. Oliver Robert Byron Bird H. Drucker Willis M. Hawkins George W. Heilmeier Luna B. Leopold H. Guyford Stever Calvin F. Cho Ray W. Clough Hermann A. Haus James L. Flanagan C. Kumar N.

Seymour Benzer used forward genetics to investigate the genetic basis of various behaviors such as phototaxis, circadian rhythms, and learning by inducing mutations in a Drosophila population and then screening individuals for altered phenotypes of interest. He identified mutants for a wide variety of characteristics: vision, locomotion, stress sensitivity, sexual function, nerve and muscle function, as well as learning and memory.

Seymour benzer biography of christopher: Abstract: Seymour Benzer () first came

Along with his student Ron Konopka, Seymour Benzer discovered the first circadian rhythm mutants and three distinct types — arrhythmic, shortened period, and lengthened period. All three mutations were mapped to the X chromosome, zero centimorgans away from each other, indicating that the mutant phenotypes corresponded to alleles of the same gene, which Konopka named period.

This was the first of several seminal studies of single genes affecting behavior, studies that have been replicated in other animal models and are now the basis for the growing field of molecular biology of behavior. In Benzer, working with Michael Rosbash, furthered this work by showing that the PER protein, which period codes for, is predominantly located in the nucleus.

The work with Period mutants was catalytic in the study of circadian rhythms and served to propel the field forward. Inhe served in the research laboratory of Roger Sperry. Inhe became a professor in the Department of Biology at Caltech. He was James G.