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Former Purdue Biology professor wins neuroscience award
An alumnus and former faculty member of Purdue Science has won an international
neuroscience prize.
Biologist Seymour Benzer, whose career has transformed the understanding
of the brain and influenced generations of scientists, has been selected
by an international panel of experts in neuroscience to receive the inaugural
2004 Neuroscience Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation.
Each year the foundation will present a gold medal and a $200,000 unrestricted
cash award to an outstanding scientist who has contributed to fundamental
advances in the field of neuroscience. This year’s prize will be
presented on October 23 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
in San Diego.
Benzer received a Ph.D. in physics from Purdue in 1947. After beginning
his career as a solid-state physicist, he switched to biology in 1949.
He was on the faculty of Purdue from 1945 until 1967, when he accepted
a professorship at the California Institute of Technology, where he is
still an active emeritus professor.
The official award citation notes that “his ingenious use of the
fruit fly as a model for studying learning and memory, neural degeneration
and aging continues to pioneer the genetic approaches now generally recognized
as an effective way to identify the cause and treatment of diseases of
the human brain.”
Using the fruit fly, Drosophila, Benzer altered one gene after the next
and showed that a single gene mutation can give rise to a wide variety
of behavioral alterations, including aberrations in courtship, in circadian
rhythm, and in memory and learning.
The studies have helped change the field of behavioral genetics and have
shown how, through the genetics of the fruit fly, the mysteries of how
the human brain develops, functions and becomes sick, can be unraveled.
Archives: Alumni Profiles | Class Notes