Seymour Benzer, Ph.D.[Physics]

National Medal of Science - Biological Sciences 1982

Physicist, molecular biologist, behavioral biologist (neurogeneticist). Post Pearl Harbor worked in secret wartime project studying semiconducting properties of germanium, work that foreshadowed development of transistor. Functional gene is a linear stretch of DNA with definable boundaries. Stretches of DNA are all linked to each other as adjacent pieces of chromosome.

Youth

In the summer in the Catskills, Seymour Benzer caught frogs and dissected them using the family’s clothes-making tools. On his 13th birthday his uncle presented him a microscope with which he established a lab in the basement. His high school chemistry teacher and the school Chemistry Club at the New Utrecht High School were very encouraging of scientific interests.

In the stock market crash of 1929, the family had lost the money saved for his college education. Seymour Benzer had Regents Scholarship for undergraduate degree in Brooklyn College where he studied physics & chemistry, 'forgoing biology because the taxonomic approach typical of biology teaching of the day seemed much less challenging.'