I found a long interview with Seymour Benzer, a biologist at Caltech, who is one of my favorite scientists — lots of creative and important work. I was pleased to learn he is a foodie. During a 1956 trip to Japan he had sushi for the first time. “One of the greatest things about the trip,” he said in 1990 (when the interview took place), presaging a future in which every upscale American supermarket sells sushi. (For dinner tonight I made salmon tartare.) When I was a student at Caltech I knew the other students liked him, but I never met him.
Benzer began the use of fruit flies to study behavior. At Woods Hole I took a course called Neural Systems and Behavior with a fruit-fly segment taught by Laurie Tompkins. She had met Benzer at a party. When she told him she studied fruit-fly mating, Benzer asked if they have orgasms. Very early in his work on behavior, he gave a talk to Roger Sperry’s lab about his plans. After his talk there was a lot of debate about it. Some people thought it was very promising; others thought it was nonsense.
Interviewer: Why were people so skeptical?
Benzer: Why? A lack of imagination.
Excellent answer. I would have said: People are always skeptical.
Really? I would say very few people are skeptical enough.
By “people” I meant the sort of people in Roger Sperry’s lab. The typical audience for a talk by a scientist to other scientists.