Background

Gerald Maurice Edelman was born on July 1, 1929, in New York City, New York, United States to Edward Edelman and Anna Freedman Edelman. His father, Edward Edelman, was a practicing physician while his mother, Anna (née Freedman) Edelman, was employed in the insurance industry.

Education

Young Gerald had his schooling at John Adam High School in Queens, New York City. Since his ambition was to become a concert violinist he also took training under noted teacher cum performer Albert Meiff.

At sixteen, Gerald realized that he did not have the required drive to become a professional violinist and decided to follow his father’s footstep and study medicine. So, after passing out from school in 1946, he enrolled at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

In 1950, he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and entered the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine. He received his doctorate in 1954. In 1955, he completed his internship at Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics and joined Massachusetts General Hospital as a medical house officer.

Later in the same year, he joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps as a captain, and for two years, practiced general medicine at a military hospital in Paris. His interest in antibodies was ignited during this period and he decided to investigate more into it.

Therefore, on returning home in 1957, he joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research as a graduate fellow. Here he explored the ways of splitting immunoglobulin molecules under Henry Kunkel, ultimately receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1960.

Career

In 1960, Gerald Edelman was appointed as Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. In 1963, he was promoted to the post of Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, and then from 1966 to 1992, he served as a full professor at the same Institute. At this time, not much was known about the chemical structure of antibodies. Although by then, it was established that they combated antigens, it was not clear how they recognized them. While working at Rockefeller Institute Edelman began his research on that. He realized that antibodies were made up of two light and two heavy amino acid chains, linked together by disulfide bonds.

By 1969 Edelman and his team at Rockefeller had succeeded in creating a precise model of an antibody molecule, which was made up of a four-amino-acid-chain (two light and two heavy chains) structure comprised of more than 1,300 amino acids. This enabled the team to identify exact locations of antigenic binding. Edelman’s group had just narrowly beaten Porter’s in achieving such a goal, and both researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for their efforts. Their work had many far-reaching effects on medical therapy, including preventing organ rejection in transplant situations. But Edelman, just 43 years old at the time, had even more to offer the world of science.

In 1975 Edelman discovered substances called cell adhesion molecules (CAMs), which "glue" cells together to form tissues. Edelman found that, as the brain develops, CAMs bind neurons together to form the brain’s basic circuitry. His work led to the construction of a general theory of brain development and function called neuronal group selection, which he explained in a trilogy of books (1987-89) for a scientific audience and in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (1992) for laypersons. He also wrote Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (2004) and Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2006).

In 1981, Edelman founded Neurosciences Institute under Rockefeller University and became its founder-director. Here he continued working on the brain and in 1987, he enlarged his theory, publishing it under the title of Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. Although his theory was criticized by many contemporary scientists, he did not give up. Subsequently, he wrote two more books to establish his hypothesis; i.e. Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology (1988) and The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (1989).

Neural Darwinism, or Neuronal Group Selection (NGS), was first presented in Edelman’s 1987 book Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The idea is described in his biography on the Cajal Conference website (citation below) as: "the theory that populations of neurons develop individual networks through a Darwinian selection process. Edelman thinks that the converse opinion, that neurons are genetically coded to make specific connections, just as transistors are wired in a preset pattern, is untenable given the limited size of eukaryotic genomes in relation with the explosive number of neuronal connections." Further, Edelman argued against the traditional concept of a fixed human nervous system, suggesting instead that neural systems continuously change. That is, the human brain has variations unique to each individual and modifies itself constantly in response to each new incoming signal.

The foregoing explanation is, necessarily, an extremely simplified and streamlined definition of a multi-faceted and complicated theory. Indeed, some of its controversies stemmed from its very complexity. Edward Rothstein of the New York Times quoted the 1988 comment of biologist Gunter Stent on NGS as "I consider myself not too dumb. I am a professor of molecular biology and chairman of the neurobiology section of the National Academy of Sciences, so I should understand it. But I don’t." Other critics found the theory either derivative or based on incorrect interpretations of other models of the mind. But Edelman ignored the naysayers and quietly continued his pioneering work.

Later, Edelman wrote a number of books explaining his ideas to general readers. They include Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), A Universe of Consciousness (2001, with Giulio Tononi), Wider than the Sky (2004), and Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2007).

From 1981 Edelman served as director of the Neurosciences Institute, which he founded at Rockefeller University. In 1993 he moved the institute to the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. From 1995 the institute was part of the Scripps Research Institute campus; it moved to another location in La Jolla in 2012. Edelman also formed and chaired (1992) the neurobiology department of the Scripps Research Institute and was a member (from 1996) of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps.

By 2005 Edelman had added other responsibilities to his resume besides heading up the Neurosciences Institute. Those included serving as chairman and professor of neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute, scientific chairman of the Neurosciences Research Program, and president of the Neurosciences Research Foundation. His institute was thriving on its own campus in La Jolla, with 36 research fellows studying nearly every field of neuroscience. Each fellow was fully funded by the Institute for up to four years, in order to insulate him or her from the vagaries and distractions of grant writing and laboratory politics, as Edelman felt such independence was necessary for proper original research. And the institute itself was an interesting reflection of its founder: one building devoted to theory, another to experimentation, and a third (a concert hall) to music.

Edelman served on the scientific board of the World Knowledge Dialogue project. He was a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Advisory Board.

While Edelman was trying to recreate the structure of the antibody at Rockefeller Institute, English biochemist Rodney R. Porter was also working on the same subject separately in England. Ultimately Edelman’s team was able to beat the English team at a narrow margin. However, the Nobel Foundation recognized both the works and awarded both of them for their achievements. In 1972, Gerald Edelman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery "concerning the chemical structure of antibodies." He shared this prize with English biochemist Rodney R. Porter, who worked on it separately in England.

Towards the end of his life, Edelman developed prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease. He died on May 17, 2014, in La Jolla, California. He was then 84 years old.

Achievements

• Gerald Edelman was a noted American Immunologist who, along with Rodney Robert Porter, won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The duo won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In addition to his studies of antibody structure, his research interests had included the application of fluorescence spectroscopy and fluorescent probes to the study of proteins and the development of new methods of fractionation of both molecules and cells.
  
  Dr. Edelman has received honorary degrees from a number of universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Ursinus College, Williams College, and others. Besides his Nobel Prize, his other academic awards include the Spenser Morris Award, the Eli Lilly Prize of the American Chemical Society, Albert Einstein Commemorative Award, California Institute of Technology's Buchman Memorial Award, and the Rabbi Shai Schaknai Memorial Prize.

Works

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• book

  • The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness

    (Integrating findings generated by the recent explosive gr...)

    1990
  • A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

    (In The Universe of Consciousness, Gerald Edelman and Giul...)

    2001
  • Neural Darwinism: The Theory Of Neuronal Group Selection

    (Neural Darwinism ranges over many disciplines, focusing o...)

    1982
  • The Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group-Selective Theory of Higher Brain Function

    (A proposal by two eminent biological scientists for a mec...)

    1982
  • The Brain

    (The breadth and scope of subjects covered in this volume ...)

    2000
  • Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness

    (In this direct and non-technical discussion of consciousn...)

    2005
  • Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge

    (In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a...)

    2007
  • Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind

    (Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman takes issue with the man...)

    1993

Religion

Gerald Edelman was raised in a Jewish family.

Views

Edelman is best remembered for his research on molecular immunology. He hypothesized that antibodies consisted of multiple amino acid chains held together by disulfide bonds. He dissolved these bonds and separated the antibodies in order to identify their components.

Subsequently, he found that antibodies were made up of two heavy and two light chains consisting of 1300 amino acids. Next he located the antigen-binding (variable) regions and effector function-conferring (constant) regions. Finally, he produced the exact replica of an antibody.

He also established that all antibodies have the same basic structure. When different antigens attack our body, it produces diverse materials, generated in the combination with various gene segments. The right antibody, selected from these materials, quickly multiplies to form the immune system.

This discovery provided a great insight into the structure and functions of antibodies. It also opened the door for further studies, which in turn had a far-reaching effect on medical science.

He is noted for his theory of mind, published in a trilogy of technical books. His work Topobiology contains a theory of how the original neuronal network of a newborn's brain is established during the development of the embryo. Neural Darwinism contains a theory of memory that is built around the idea of plasticity in the neural network in response to the environment. The Remembered Present contains a theory of consciousness.

Edelman expounds a biological theory of consciousness, which he explicitly locates within Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and Darwinian theories of population dynamics. He rejects dualism and also dismisses newer hypotheses such as the so-called 'computational' model of consciousness, which liken the brain's functions to the operations of a computer.

Edelman argues that the mind and consciousness are wholly material and purely biological phenomena, occurring as highly complex cellular processes within the brain and that the development of consciousness and intelligence can be satisfactorily explained by Darwinian theory.

Quotations: "Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary."

"Brains operate...not by logic but by pattern recognition. This process is not precise, as is logic and mathematics. Instead, it trades off specificity and precision, if necessary, to increase its range. It is likely, for example, that early human thought proceeded by metaphor, which, even with the late acquisition of precise means such as logic and mathematical thought, continues to be a major source of imagination and creativity in adult life."

"Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal."

"When finally substantiated by scientific means, such a view will allow an individual to see his place in the world with greater clarity - how he came from the world and how he may contribute to his fellows while he enjoys for a brief time the privilege of consciousness and communication."

Membership

Edelman was a member of many distinguished scientific societies like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Biological Chemists, and the American Association of Immunologists.

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

• American Society of Biological Chemists , United States

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  American Association of Immunologists , United States

Personality

Edelman's friends described him as a Renaissance man of striking erudition who displayed a masterful knowledge of science, music, literature, and the visual arts who at one time could have been a concert violinist. He loved telling a good Jewish joke just as much as explaining the principles of neuronal selection.

Edelman was convinced that scientific breakthroughs require both sharp minds and inspiring environments.

Interests

• violin

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Linus Pauling, Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Artists

  Woody Allen

• Music & Bands

  Jascha Heifetz

Connections

Gerald Maurice Edelman married Maxine M. Morrison in 1950. They have two sons, Eric, a visual artist in New York City, and David, an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of San Diego. Their daughter, Judith Edelman, is a bluegrass musician, recording artist, and writer.

Father:

Edward Edelman

Mother:

Anna Edelman

Spouse:

Maxine M. Morrison

Son:

Eric Edelman

Son:

David Edelman

Daughter:

Judith Edelman

colleague:

Rodney Robert Porter

Rodney Robert Porter and Gerald Edelman shared the Nobel Prize in 1972.

References

• How We Know: Nobel Conference XX Essays discuss the human brain, memory, learning, computer models of education, artificial intelligence, and religious and scientific views of human nature.
  1986