HENRY

William Harris in PLoS Biology:

Seymour Benzer was born in 1921 in the South Bronx, New York, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants. He was the only boy in a family that included his three sisters. His friend from later years, the phage biologist Jean Weigle, called Seymour the “egg with two yellows”, an old European expression for a rare event. He went to public schools in Brooklyn like any normal New York City kid, but everything changed when, at 13, a relative gave him a microscope for his Bar Mitzvah. “And that”, Seymour said, “opened up the whole world”. 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.

Posted on February 13th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill