Oral Histories
Seymour Benzer
• Pioneer in molecular biology and behavioral genetics
• Professor at Purdue and Caltech
• Showed that genes are linear
Seymour Benzer began his career as a physicist, but switched to biology after reading What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger. He left Purdue University, where he had received his PhD and was an assistant professor, for a postdoc in biology at Caltech. He returned to Purdue, where he established that mutations lie in many areas of a gene. Benzer left Purdue for Caltech once more in 1967 to work in behavioral genetics. He received numerous awards for his contributions to the life sciences, and died in 2007.
Video: Conversations in Genetics at The Genetics Society of America