Background

Eric Richard Kandel was born on November 7, 1929, in Vienna, Austria to the family of Hermann Kandel and Charlotte Zimels. His mother had come from Kolomyya in Eastern Poland (he used to joke "as with all bright people, my roots are in Poland") and his father from Olesko in Western Ukraine. His parents met in Vienna and married in 1923, shortly after his father had established a toy store. They were a thoroughly assimilated family, which had to leave Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938, Aryanization (Arisierung) started and attacks on Jews and Jewish property escalated. Kandel's ninth birthday was the day before Kristallnacht, an intense night of violence against Jewish people. Police arrested Jewish men, including Kandel's father. Jewish families were temporarily evicted from their homes. Kandel's father, who had served in World War I, was released several days later. After about a week, the family received permission to return home. Everything valuable had been stolen. In 1939, the Kandels left Austria and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they lived with Charlotte's parents. Herman worked in a toothbrush factory and then opened a clothing store.

Education

Eric Kandel attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, a Jewish elementary school. He graduated from the elementary school in 1944 and became a United States citizen during the mid-1940s. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Encouraged by a history teacher, Kandel applied to Harvard. The university accepted Kandel and gave him a scholarship. At Harvard, Kandel majored in 19th and 20th-century European history and literature. He intended to do graduate research on European intellectual history but his plan changed when he met Anna Kris, a student from Vienna. Her parents, Ernest and Marianne, were psychoanalysts who knew Sigmund Freud. Kandel began to think psychoanalysis offered another approach to understanding the mind and memory. He decided to become a psychoanalyst.

After graduating from Harvard in 1952, Kandel entered New York University's medical school. By his senior year there, Kandel's career direction changed again. He felt he needed to learn more about the biology of the mind. New York University did not have a faculty member working with basic neural science, so Kandel studied that subject at Columbia University in New York City. In 1955, he began working in the Columbia lab with Harry Grundfest. Kandel was encouraged in that work by a new Jewish friend whose family fled the Nazis. Denise Bystryn was a French woman who met Kandel while she studied at Columbia for a doctorate in medical sociology. Kandel graduated from medical school in 1956 and married Bystryn.

Career

After graduating and marriage, Eric Kandel divided his time between a medical residency at Montefiore Hospital and work at the lab. In 1957, Kandel began doing research at the National Institutes of Health Laboratory of Neurophysiology.

Kandel arranged to study in Paris, France, with Ladislav Tauc, one of two researchers working with Aplysia. Before going to France, Kandel needed to complete a two-year residency in psychiatry. In 1960, he began residency training at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of Harvard Medical School. In September of 1962, Kandel took his family to Paris. After 16 months in Paris, Kandel returned to Harvard Medical School. He served on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry until 1965. That year, he joined the faculty of New York University as an associate professor. Furthermore, his daughter, Minouche, was born in 1965. Three years later, Kandel was named a professor at New York University.

In 1974, Kandel was invited to serve as founding director of the Columbia University's Center for Neurobiology and Behavior. In addition to work as a professor, Kandel would research memory. Kandel left the lab in 1984 to become a senior investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia. He continued to research and teach.

In 1998, Kandel co-founded Memory Pharmaceuticals with Dr. Walter Gilbert, a Nobel Laureate and Harvard professor specializing in molecular genetics. The company, licensed in agreement with Columbia University, explores drug treatments for memory disorders.

In March of 2003, Memory Pharmaceuticals announced that the drug company Roche would do clinical studies on MEM1414, a compound discovered by Memory Pharmaceuticals. Studies on the chemical mixture targeted for the treatment of Alzheimer's could lead to the development of drugs to treat the condition. While there was no pill to improve memory on the market as of December of 2004, hope was in sight. The drugs were in the early stages of clinical trials that could be finished in as little as "two years, if we're lucky," Kandel told Newsweek's Mary Carmichael.

Kandel's books included The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012) and The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018). In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006) was an autobiography.

Achievements

• Eric Kandel has managed to achieve a great reputation and renown as a scientist. He has received twenty-two honorary degrees. He has been recognized with the Albert Lasker Award, the Heineken Award of the Netherlands, the Gairdner Award of Canada, the Wolf Prize of Israel, and the National Medal of Science. In 2000, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Kandel, American Paul Greengard, and Arvin Carlsson of Sweden. They were honored for career achievements in research related to "signal transduction in the nervous system."

Works

More photos

• book

  • Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind

    (Brought together for the first time in a single volume, t...)

    2005
  • The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

    (In his seminal new book, The Disordered Mind, Kandel draw...)

    2018
  • Principles of Neural Science

    (Deciphering the link between the human brain and behavior...)

    1981
  • Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

    (Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? ...)

    2016
  • Essentials of Neural Science and Behavior

    (This book introduces undergraduate students to the fundam...)

    1995
  • The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

    (A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, Th...)

    2012
  • In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

    (Memory binds our mental life together. We are who we are ...)

    2007
  • Cellular Basis of Behaviour: An Introduction to Behavioural Neurobiology 1976
  • A cell-biological approach to learning 1978
  • Behavioral Biology of Aplysia: A Contribution to the Comparative Study of Opisthorbranch Molluscs 1979
  • Molecular Neurobiology in Neurology and Psychiatry 1987

• publication

  • Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings

    (Neuroscience increasingly allows us to explain, predict, ...)

    2010

Religion

Eric Kandel was brought up and educated as Jewish.

Politics

In 2006, Eric Kandel has compared the effects of government science policy to the Eisenhower-McCarthy era, when scientists were persecuted for their political beliefs. Kandel's remarks came during an interview with Science & the City, the webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences, about his new memoir, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. He stated: "There's very little funding, there's political censorship about what one does and how one speaks about it. I think the scientific community is extremely concerned about the future of this country given the restrictions on science at the moment." He added later that these restrictions are "all the more tragic since biomedical research is at a wonderfully productive point right now and in a position to have a profound impact on the treatment of disease. Moreover, the country is training the next generation of scientists and unless more funding is forthcoming, we cannot assure their future or the American leadership in science."

Views

Kandel's early research focused on the biology of cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain related to memory. After working with mammals, Kandel wanted to take a biological approach and do a less complicated study. That work would initially involve invertebrates, creatures with no backbones. Some neurobiologists and psychologists thought Kandel was making a mistake, one that would hurt his career. They believed that a mammal's brain was so complex that research results could not be compared with studies involving invertebrates. Kandel knew that some comparative behavior researchers like Konrad Lorenz discovered that humans and simple animals sometimes behaved the same way when they learned. Kandel reasoned that since nothing was known about the cell biology of learning, that any insight would be highly informative. After researching subjects including crayfish, lobsters, and snails, Kandel decided to concentrate on Aplysia. While the human brain contains billions of nerve cells, the sea slug only has 20,000.

In France, Kandel and Tauc started research on the gill-withdrawal reflex of the sea slug. Aplysia, which are five inches long, breathe through gills. If the slug is touched on or near the gill, it instinctively protects itself by withdrawing and covering the gill area with a skin flap. The stimulus used to cause the reflex included touching the tail or injecting a needle. Repeatedly touching the Aplysia eventually caused the slug to withdraw less.

Kandel wanted to know how Aplysia learned to avoid the reflex. At Columbia, his gill-withdrawal research showed that memory and learning were the result of changes in the synapse, the place where there is contact between adjacent neurons. The lab showed that cells communicate by signal transduction, meaning a message is sent from one cell to another through chemical transmitters. The signal transfer occurs at the synapse. A weaker stimulus in slugs resulted in short-term memory that lasted several hours or days. Short-term memory involved a process called adenosine monophosphate (AMP). A stronger stimulus produced long-term memory that lasted weeks. Kandel's lab discovered that memory was triggered by variations of a molecule called CREB (cyclic-AMP-response element-binding protein). CREB changes the short-term memory into long-term memory that in humans can last months or years. In that process, the shape of the synapse changes.

During the 1990s, Kandel broadened his research to include mice. The mice experienced many of the changes that Aplysia did, indicating that findings about memory applied to mammals. Mouse research showed that a process called long-term potentiation (LTP) increased the efficiency of signals that neurons send to the brain. LTP is essential in the area of the brain that holds memories of people, places, and things. Kandel's research could lead to the development of treatments for memory-related conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Quotations: "As knowledge advances and scientific disciplines change, so do the disciplines impinging on them."

"What is learning but a set of sensory signals from the environment, with different forms of learning resulting from different types or patterns of sensory signals?"

"The same CREB switch is important for many forms of implicit memory in a variety of other species, from bees to mice to people."

"For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and emotional states that have vanished into the past yet somehow continue to live in our minds."

"Recall of memory is a creative process. What the brain stores is... only a core memory. Upon recall, this memory is then elaborated upon and reconstructed, with subtractions, additions, elaborations, and distortions."

"What biological processes enable me to review my own history with such emotional vividness?"

"Each sensory system first analyzes and deconstructs, then restructures the raw, incoming information to its own built-in connections and rules."

"Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to revelations about how the brain works."

"Reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art."

Membership

Eric Richard Kandel is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, the French Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

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  German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , Germany

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

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  Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , Germany

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  Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz , Germany

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  French Academy of Sciences , France

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  American Philosophical Society , United States

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  Austrian Academy of Sciences , Austria

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  Royal Society of Edinburgh , United Kingdom

Personality

Kandel and his wife Denise collect avidly: French art nouveau furniture, vases and lamps, and a good deal of graphic art, especially that of the Austrian and German Expressionists.

Interests

• history, literature

• Artists

  Gustave Klimt

Connections

Columbia scientists Eric Kandel and Denise Bystryn have been married since 1956. They have two children: Paul Kandel and Minouche Kandel.

Father:

Hermann Kandel

Mother:

Charlotte Zimels

Wife:

Denise Bystryn

Son:

Paul Kandel

Daughter:

Minouche Kandel

colleague:

Paul Greengard

References

• Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains
  2018
• On the Frontiers of Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Essays in Honor of Eric R. Kandel
  2013
• Cognitive Neuroscience
  2018