Seymour Benzer
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Seymour Benzer (born October 15, 1921) is an accomplished American physicist and biologist. He is currently James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology. He is a recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1964), the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1971), the National Medal of Science (1982), the Wolf Prize in Medicine (1991), the Crafoord Prize (1993), and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2006) and a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society.
He is best known for work with mutants of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Benzer, with student Ron Konopka, discovered the first circadian rhythm mutants in a gene they called "period."
Benzer is the subject of the 1999 book "Time, Love, Memory : A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner and the 2006 book "Reconceiving the Gene: Seymour Benzer's Adventures in Phage Genetics" by Lawrence Holmes.
External links
- [Dr. Benzer's home page at the Caltech Biology Division website]
- [Benzer Lab home page]
- [Interview with Seymour Benzer] conducted by the Oral History Project of the Caltech Archives
- [A Conversation with Jonathan Weiner, author of Time, Love, Memory]
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