Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA00932 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 2 May 2000 09:48:11 +0100 Subject: Fwd: A Conversation with Jonathan Weiner, author of Time, Love, Memory Date: Mon, 1 May 2000 09:30:05 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas est veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20000501133029.AAA15689@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
A Conversation with Jonathan Weiner, author of Time, Love, Memory
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/aak/qna/weiner.html
[Mr. Weiner will be at the Harvard Coop on Thursday this week in a
discussion of this book.]
Q: What, as a writer, drew you to the world of science and specifically
to the idea for TIME, LOVE, MEMORY?
A: When I was growing up, I wanted to be either a scientist or a writer.
My father was a physicist and my mother was a children's librarian, so I
was always surrounded by scientists and books. Within my first ten
minutes of college, I chose writing. But soon after I graduated, I found
a way to do both, and I've been writing about science ever since.
Lately, one book leads to another. Each book's last chapter leads me to a
subject that I want to explore. In my book The Beak of the Finch, which
is about watching evolution happen live, so to speak, watching evolution
in real time, in the Galapagos Islands, I close with some speculations
about the future evolution of the human species. Not long after I'd
finished that book, early in 1994, I heard about an experiment that
amazed me. A team of biologists had managed to dissect the gene for an
instinct, cut it out of an animal, and inject it into the genes of
another animal. I knew right away that this kind of experiment would turn
out to bear in some way, for better or worse, on the future evolution of
human beings. It didn't matter that the animals--fruit flies in this
case--seemed at first glance very far away from human concerns. I knew it
was a breakthrough in science that would eventually impact us.
Q: There has been much written about genetics over the past few years.
What did you feel was still unsaid? What important stories are still to
be told?
A: For the last few years the headlines about genetics have made it sound
as if everything about human nature is already understood The headlines
announce discoveries like "the selfish gene," "the happiness gene," "the
gay gene," "the novelty-seeking gene," when in actuality the connection
between genes and behavior is one of the hardest and most fascinating
problems in science, as you soon find out when you talk to the biologists
who are doing the experiments. When they try to dissect an actual strip
of DNA, a submicroscopic snippet of a molecule that shapes some piece of
behavior in flies, or in us, they find out what an infinitely tangled
process this is.
I wanted to write a report from the field: to watch the first scientists
find the first genes and molecules that make behavior happen, watch
people try to observe the action on that sort of solid, nuts-and-bolts
level, the hipbone-is-connected-to-thighbone level. Ours is the first
generation that can go beyond the ancient arguments over nature and
nurture and begin to see what really happens. The more time I spent in
the labs of this book's central characters the more I felt that the whole
history of science in the twentieth century has been building toward this
moment. In the first years of the century, the modern theory of the gene
came out of a fly bottle; and now these molecular biologists are
beginning to trace the path from gene to behavior, in flies and in us.
That's a great story--in some ways it's the story of the century in
biology--and in spite of all the headlines and all the genomania it's a
story that hasn't been told.
Cloning makes the story more urgent. Many biologists believe the first
human being will be cloned within five years. So the lessons we've
learned about genes and behavior in flies and other animals could have
human applications--again, for better or worse--very soon.
Q: Where did the modern theory of the gene first originate?
A: The gene theory came out of the first Fly Room, which was built by a
biologist named Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was the world's first modern
geneticist. In the early years of this century he and his students
literally put genes on the map: they made the first maps showing that
genes exist and that genes are on the snake-like microscopic bodies
called chromosomes that they could see in the center of every living
cell's nucleus. Morgan's uncle was the Civil War general whose guerilla
band was known as Morgan's Raiders; and so the first gene-mappers in the
Fly Room were known as Morgan's Raiders.
Q: You call Seymour Benzer "one of the unsung heroes of our time." How
has this man (responsible for such a big and important series of
experiments in biology) managed to stay virtually unknown while names
like Watson and Crick have become instantly recognizable?
A: There's no question that Benzer is one of the great scientists of the
century, and it's surprising that outside of his own field, no one knows
his name. I should say, outside his fields, because he's a maverick
scientist who keeps jumping around. His work as a physicist in the 1940s
helped start the revolution in electronics, which of course is the single
biggest industry in the U.S. today. His work as a biologist in the '50s
helped start the revolution called molecular biology, which is probably
the most exciting and fast-moving field in science today. Benzer helped
start that revolution by making the first detailed map of the interior of
a gene. And a study he started in the '60s is now central to the study of
genes and behavior, which may be one of the most exciting and disturbing
scientific fields in the twenty-first century. More than anyone else,
Benzer started the effort to trace the actual, physical links from gene
to behavior--he called it the genetic dissection of behavior.
Why isn't he better known? Because he doesn't want to be. Unlike most of
his friends, he's never written his memoirs, never written a book, hates
to talk to reporters. He says he's too busy. He has too much fun in the
lab.
Q: How did you convince Benzer to let you in on his research and what
does he think of the book?
A: : I still don't know why he decided to talk to me. Normally he brushes
off reporters--like flies. But we hit it off; we understood each other.
Maybe it helped that he and my parents grew up poor in Brooklyn; he and
my mother lived just a few blocks apart, although they never met.
Benzer's a night owl, as I say in the book, and on my first visit to
Caltech, we ended up sitting up talking about life until two or three in
the morning.
Now I think he's worried that the book will bring him too much attention,
because what I've written is his story as well as a report from the
field. The phrase "a great scientist" embarrasses him horribly. So he's
nervous, but I think he does like the book. When I first showed him the
manuscript he sent me an e-mail that said, essentially, "I laughed, I
cried, I blushed." His daughter Barbie is the unofficial family
historian, and she loves the book.
Q: What impact will Benzer's work--and that of his colleagues--have on
us, in the near future and in the long run?
A: Molecular biology, the science Benzer and Watson and Crick and a few
other pioneers helped to start, is already changing our lives. Its impact
is so huge that no one can keep up with it. Molecular biology is
revolutionizing medicine, and the pharmaceutical industry, bringing us
fundamental insights into the workings of our bodies and our minds.
As for Benzer's work on genes and behavior: How important that is depends
partly on how important genes are in human behavior, and that's still one
of the most controversial questions in science. Even though Benzer helped
to open this field, he's very conscious that genes are not the whole
story.
That said, this field may well turn out to lead to as big a change in our
lives as the other revolutionary fields he's pioneered--electronics and
molecular biology. Maybe bigger, because we're talking here about
questions that are as basic and deep as we can get--why we are who we are.
Q: You write, "Biology opened first glimpses of the foundation stones of
experience: time, love, and memory." How so?
A: This is what I mean by deep. Benzer and his students have found
insights into time, love, and memory by working with flies. They found
genes for the sense of time--you didn't know that flies have that, did
you?--and now those same genes have been discovered in human beings:
genes with quirky names like "period" and "timeless." They also found
genes that decide the sex of flies, and flies' sex lives--and again, some
of those genes have been found in human beings, including a rather weird
gene called "fruitless." And they've found genes that help give us our
ability to remember--and forget. Again some of these genes are basic for
the memories of flies, worms, mice and people--for virtually every living
animal. They are cornerstones of behavior and experience.
Q: It is hard to imagine that we'll ever really know why people act
exactly the way they do. Are we putting too much faith in the belief that
genetics will help us understand behavior? In other words: How much of us
is in our genes?
A: You know, I think we're so interested in genes right now that we can't
see the forest for the trees. Actually we all know the answer to this
question. We know that genes are crucial and we know that genes are not
everything. Benzer has a dog, a golden retriever named Cassandra. She's a
sweet dog, like most goldens. That's in the genes. But obviously not
everything about Cassandra is in the genes. As Benzer says, "You buy a
dog based on breed, but then you sure as hell try to train it."
In a way I mean the title of my book as an answer to this question: Time,
Love, Memory. Our sense of time is in the genes: we each inherit a kind
of living clockwork encoded in our DNA, and Benzer and his students found
it there and took it apart and put it back together. They can change a
letter of genetic code and change how fast the hands go around the clock.
Here our old vision of the universe as a Newtonian clockwork does carry
inward to the genes. We can fight our clocks for a while--by pulling an
all-nighter or flying from New York to Paris--but we know it when we do:
the clockwork keeps ticking on its own rhythms, like our heartbeat.
Our love lives are at least partly in our genes, too, since genes decide
if we are going to be male or female, and genes decide some of our
behavior as we grow up. No one who has lived through life as an
adolescent boy can doubt that some of our reactions are as programmed as
clockwork. On the other hand, no one with a love life can doubt that
there is a little more at play here than there is in our sense of time.
Here our choices are more open-ended.
And memory is more open-ended yet. We inherit the gift of memory just as
much as we inherit our sense of time or our biological sex. Benzer and
his students have found memory genes too and they are pieces of DNA like
all the rest, including a gene called creb, which is like an on and off
switch that decides whether we'll remember something short-term or
long-term. But just what we will experience, what we will remember and
forget, that is not written in our genes like clockwork. With memory we
come to a place where life is more open-ended, where we find room for
chance and some hope of freedom. Here our genes give us a cup we fill
ourselves.
Q: You chronicle some of the most fascinating biological discoveries of
our time. In addition to being awed, did you ever find yourself
frightened by their implications?
A: Yes. Knowledge of genes and behavior can be horribly abused. Even when
it was only half-knowledge and pseudo-science, earlier in the century, it
led to horrors, both in state-sponsored eugenics programs in this country
and in Europe during the Holocaust. As the science grows more solid and
powerful, who knows where it will lead. I like to write about science and
life in a spirit of celebration and for that reason I sometimes found
this book very hard to finish. I found that more and more often I was
driven to that phrase "for better and for worse."
Q: In Benzer's laboratory one will find fly bottles filled with mutants
with names like "timeless," "fruitless" and "bizarre." This is actually
quite poetic. Do scientists see the poetry and beauty in their work or
are they mostly interested in the cold, hard facts?
A:Scientists come in all shapes and sizes, like everybody else. Some are
poetic and some are prosaic. But fly people, as they call themselves, do
have a lot of fun naming their discoveries. Benzer's Raiders sit around
the lunch table in his Fly Room arguing about what to call the genes that
give flies brain diseases. Sometimes they name the genes after the foods
that the flies' brain lesions look like to them through the microscope:
eggroll, popcorn, bubblegum, meringue, chocolate chip. Again, some of
these genes turn out to have close human counterparts, so understanding
the genes in the fly's brain may lead to understanding our own. To me the
single most poetic discovery of biology in our time is the discovery that
at the level of the genes we have so much in common with every other
living thing on Earth, even fruit flies.
Q: At one point in your book Benzer reflects back to the 1960s when there
was a sense that the quest was over, the greatest discoveries already
made, and he laughs. You argue that a century of scientific discovery has
really only brought us to the beginning of what is possible. So, what
does the future hold?
A: Even today there are people who'll argue that we've found out
everything really earthshaking we can find out--that science is over. But
through work like Benzer's we're really just beginning to trace the paths
from genes to brains and brains to behavior. Within a few years
biologists are going to have spelled out every last letter of the genetic
code in flies, worms, mice, and human beings. And they're going to have
more and more powerful tools called DNA chips that will allow them to
check someone's genes and see, virtually at a glance, all the private
variations on each theme, and see which genes are switched on and which
ones are switched off. They'll compare our genes with the rest of the
living world, and they'll compare the subtler variations from one human
being to another, to figure out more and more about what these gene
sequences mean to us. Some of the first solid studies of this kind in
human beings are in the press as we speak. We're going to be learning a
lot about ourselves in the next few years--for better and for worse.
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