Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
The Fly in the DNA
By Helen Epstein
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior
by Jonathan Weiner
Knopf, 300 pp., $27.50
In San Francisco I once knew a woman who had been adopted as a baby. When first I met her she hadn't seen her mother since the day she was born, and had never met her father or any other blood relative. When she was twenty-one years old, she managed, somehow, to track down her mother, who was then living in central California with a man, not her father, and four other children. My friend wrote to the family and was invited to visit them in their large, noisy house on the outskirts of a large town. On the day she arrived she stayed up talking late into the night. Finally everyone went to bed. But at around three in the morning my friend woke up. She often got hungry in the middle of the night, and was in the habit of making plain spaghetti at two or three in the morning. She decided to go down to the kitchen to see what was there. To her astonishment, she found her mother standing by the stove, boiling a pot of spaghetti. 'That's how I knew she was my mother,' my friend said. 'She ate spaghetti in the middle of the night, just like me.'
Review, 5441 words
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