LOS ANGELES ­- Seymour Benzer, the California Institute of Technology biologist who made key findings about the structure and function of genes and pioneered research linking genes to behavior, died from a stroke Friday at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. He was 86.

Many of his colleagues said he should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for his achievements in elucidating the nature of genes and their links to everyday activities.

Although the prize was denied him, he did win several other major awards that are generally considered precursors of the Nobel, including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the richest U.S. prize for scientific achievement.

“Seymour was one of the greatest scientists of our era and made fundamental contributions in several areas,” said biologist Elliot Meyerowitz of Caltech. “He was an amazing person, a truly original scientific thinker, and an adventurous character both in and out of his scientific work.”

Benzer had “that special imagination and view of the world that makes a great scientist,” biologist Lewis Wolpert wrote in a New York Times review of Jonathan Weiner’s 1999 biography of Benzer, “Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and his Quest for the Origins of Behavior.”

When Benzer began his research in the early 1950s, geneticists considered genes to be indivisible units strung together on chromosomes like pearls on a necklace.

Benzer, however, reasoned that each gene was composed of discrete segments that could reassemble in new combinations when two individuals mated.

Testing that theory was difficult, however, because such recombinations are extremely rare and can be difficult to identify. To overcome both problems, he focused on one of the smallest organisms known, called a phage. Phages are tiny viruses that infect bacteria and that reproduce remarkably rapidly, making a hundred copies of themselves in 20 minutes.

Benzer mated two different strains of a phage called T4, each with a discrete mutation that prevented it from growing on the bacterium “Escherichia coli.” When he spread the phage offspring on a culture dish where the E. coli was growing, he soon observed a clear spot where the bacteria had been killed by the phage — indicating that the offspring had obtained healthy segments of the crucial gene from each parent.

The results confirmed that genes can be split into individual elements and verified James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of the gene as consisting of many nucleotide pairs.

Benzer eventually identified a large number of mutants of the gene, called “rII,” and mapped their locations. One of his accomplishments was determining that certain key compounds could produce mutations in the phages. The chemical 5-bromouracil, for example, can replace thymine in the synthesis of DNA, creating a nonfunctional mutation at specific points. These points proved to be different from those at which spontaneous mutations most frequently occur.

Using thousands of different mutations, he found that there was a mutation site that corresponded with each nucleotide along the DNA segment that composed the gene.

He also showed that there were short functional units within the gene that could function independently regardless of defects in other units. He named them cistrons.

In his search for mutations, he also studied mutant forms of transfer RNA, or tRNA. tRNA binds to individual amino acids and connects them to the growing string that eventually becomes a protein. He discovered that there could be several different tRNAs that would each bind to the same amino acid while responding to different DNA codes — a concept called degeneracy.

By attaching an amino acid to a tRNA molecule and then chemically altering the identity of the amino acid fragment, he verified Crick’s prediction that the RNA controlled the fate of the molecule, not the amino acid.

Benzer later turned to studies of how genes affect behavior, using the fruit fly “Drosophila melanogaster” as a model. He said later that he was inspired by the birth of his second daughter, whose behavior was markedly different from that of his first-born. “I wondered, “Are my wife and I doing things that differently?’ ” he said.

He and his students identified flies with unusual behaviors — a feat that often necessitated the invention of special equipment for screening the insects — and bred them to form new strains. He found flies, for example, that had circadian rhythms of 14 hours and 28 hours rather than the normal period of 24 hours. Circadian rhythms govern waking and sleep cycles, as well as a variety of other functions.

The team eventually identified the genes that were associated with the altered behavior and tracked down the aberrant proteins they produced, shedding new light on the normal functions of the genes.

Other genes he tracked down governed courtship, memory and learning, among other things.

His Polish immigrant mother questioned his work, he often joked, asking “From this you can make a living?” He downplayed his achievements, noting that “My mother always regarded me as a failure because I didn’t get the Nobel Prize.”

His work “paved the way for scientists to uncover links between genes and human behavior, which have resulted in our improved ability to treat diseases of the brain and central nervous system,” said James J. Barba, president and chief executive of the Albany Medical Center in awarding the Albany prize.

Seymour Benzer was born Oct. 15, 1921, in New York City and studied physics at Brooklyn College. He received his doctorate from Purdue University in 1947. As a graduate student, he worked on the development of germanium semiconductors for use in radar, work that ultimately led to the invention of the transistor.

While doing the work, however, he read Erwin Schrodinger’s book, “What Is Life?” and became captivated by the idea of applying physical concepts to biological problem. To learn the fundamentals of the new field, he apprenticed himself in the laboratories of prominent researchers at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Caltech — an approach he repeated often throughout his career.

He changed research fields often, he said, because he like “being very stupid” in a new discipline. “Ask stupid questions and you often get amazing answers,” he added.

Benzer was a faculty member at Purdue for 20 years before moving to Caltech in 1965. Even after his formal retirement in 1992, he kept working in the laboratory up until his death. His most recent accomplishment was the identification of a gene, called “Methuselah,” that let fruit flies live 35 percent longer and made them resistant to heat, starvation and poison.

Because of his love for Asian food, he also was searching for genes that would predispose fruit flies to love wasabi and hot chiles.

He married the former Dorothy Vlosky in 1942, and they were together until her death in 1978. Two years later, he married University of Southern California neuropathologist Carol A. Miller.

Drawing from his research, he observed that his marriage to Miller was successful despite the fact that their circadian rhythms fell into vastly different patterns. Miller kept a normal schedule, arising at 6 a.m. and retiring at 10 p.m. Benzer, however, would work in his lab until 4 a.m., then sleep until noon.

“We try to have dinner together,” he said.

In addition to his wife, Benzer is survived by two daughters, Barbara Freidin of Princeton, N.J., and Martha Goldberg of Boulder, Colo.; a son, Alexander, of Pasadena; two stepsons, Renny and Douglas Feldman of Los Angeles; and four grandchildren.


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.