Eric Kandel

Eric's mother, Charlotte Zimels, was born in 1897 in Kolomyya, Pokuttya (modern Ukraine).

She came from an Ashkenazi Jewish family.

At that time Kolomyya was part of Austria-Hungary.

His father, Hermann Kandel, was born in 1898 in Olesko, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary).

At the beginning of World War I, his parents moved to Vienna, Austria, where they met and married in 1923.

Eric Richard Kandel (born Erich Richard Kandel, November 7, 1929 ) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

Eric Kandel was born on November 7, 1929, in Vienna.

Shortly after, Eric's father established a toy store.

But, although thoroughly assimilated and acculturated, they left Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938.

As a result of Aryanization (Arisierung), attacks on Jews had escalated and Jewish property was being confiscated.

When Eric was 9, he and his brother Ludwig, 14, boarded the Gerolstein at Antwerp, Belgium, and joined their uncle in Brooklyn on May 11, 1939, to be followed later by his parents.

After arriving in the United States and settling in Brooklyn, Kandel was tutored by his grandfather in Judaic studies and was accepted at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, from which he graduated in 1944.

He attended Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School in the New York City school system.

Kandel's undergraduate major at Harvard was History and Literature.

He wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on "The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger".

While at Harvard, a place where psychology was dominated by the work of B. F. Skinner, Kandel became interested in learning and memory.

However, while Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology, as its own level of discourse, from biological considerations such as neurology, Kandel's work is essentially centered on an explanation of the relationships between psychology and neurology.

The world of neuroscience was opened up to Kandel when he met Anna Kris, whose parents Ernst Kris and Marianne Rie were psychoanalysts.

Sigmund Freud, a pioneer in revealing the importance of unconscious neural processes, was at the root of Kandel's interest in the biology of motivation and unconscious and conscious memory.

In 1952 he started at the New York University Medical School.

By graduation he was firmly interested in the biological basis of the mind.

During this time he met his future wife, Denise Bystryn.

Kandel was first exposed to research in Harry Grundfest's laboratory at Columbia University.

Grundfest was known for using the oscilloscope to demonstrate that conduction velocity during an action potential depends on axon diameter.

The researchers Kandel interacted with were contemplating the technical challenges of intracellular recordings of the electrical activity of the relatively small neurons of the vertebrate brain.

After starting his neurobiological work in the difficult thicket of the electrophysiology of the cerebral cortex, Kandel was impressed by the progress that had been made by Stephen Kuffler using a much more experimentally accessible system: neurons isolated from marine invertebrates.

After becoming aware of Kuffler's work in 1955, Kandel graduated from medical school and learned from Stanley Crain how to make microelectrodes that could be used for intracellular recordings of crayfish giant axons.

Karl Lashley, a well-known American neuropsychologist, had tried but failed to identify an anatomical locus for memory storage in the cortex of the brain.

When Kandel joined the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the US National Institutes of Health in 1957, William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner had recently described the patient HM, who had lost the ability to form new memories after removal of his hippocampus.

Kandel took on the task of performing electrophysiological recordings from hippocampal pyramidal neurons.

Working with Alden Spencer, he found electrophysiological evidence for action potentials in the dendritic trees of hippocampal neurons.

The team also noticed the spontaneous pacemaker-like activity of these neurons, as well as a robust recurrent inhibition in the hippocampus.

They provided the first intracellular records of the electrical activity that underlies the epileptic spike (the intracellular paroxysmal depolarizing shift) and the epileptic runs of spikes (the intracellular sustained depolarization).

But, with respect to memory, there was nothing in the general electrophysiological properties of hippocampal neurons that suggested why the hippocampus was special for explicit memory storage.

He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons.

He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.

He is a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He was also the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University.

He currently serves on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Kandel's popularized account chronicling his life and research, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.