Eric Richard Kandel 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.
36 Facts About Eric Kandel
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Eric Kandel was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons.
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Eric Kandel shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.
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Eric Kandel is a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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Eric Kandel was the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University.
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Eric Kandel's mother, Charlotte Zimels, was born in 1897 in Kolomyya, Pokuttya.
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Eric Kandel's father, Hermann Kandel, was born in 1898 in Olesko, Galicia.
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Eric Kandel was born on November 7,1929, in Vienna.
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When Eric Kandel 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.
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Eric Kandel attended Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School in the New York City school system.
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However, while Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology, as its own level of discourse, from biological considerations such as neurology, Eric Kandel's work is essentially centered on an explanation of the relationships between psychology and neurology.
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Eric Kandel was first exposed to research in Harry Grundfest's laboratory at Columbia University.
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The researchers Eric Kandel interacted with were contemplating the technical challenges of intracellular recordings of the electrical activity of the relatively small neurons of the vertebrate brain.
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When Eric 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.
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Eric Kandel took on the task of performing electrophysiological recordings from hippocampal pyramidal neurons.
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Eric Kandel began to realize that memory storage must rely on modifications in the synaptic connections between neurons and that the complex connectivity of the hippocampus did not provide the best system for study of the detailed function of synapses.
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Eric Kandel was aware that comparative studies of behavior, such as those by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch had revealed that simple forms of learning were found even in very simple animals.
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Eric Kandel felt it would be productive to select a simple animal model that would facilitate electrophysiological analysis of the synaptic changes involved in learning and memory storage.
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Eric Kandel believed that, ultimately, the results would be found to be applicable to humans.
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In 1962, after completing his residency in psychiatry, Eric Kandel went to Paris to learn about the marine mollusk Aplysia californica from Ladislav Tauc.
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Eric Kandel had realized that simple forms of learning such as habituation, sensitization, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning could readily be studied with ganglia isolated from Aplysia.
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In 1965 Eric Kandel published his initial results, including a form of presynaptic potentiation that seemed to correspond to a simple form of learning.
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Eric Kandel took a position in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry at the New York University Medical School, eventually forming the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior.
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In 1974 Eric Kandel moved his lab to Columbia University and became founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior.
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In 1983 Eric Kandel helped form the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute at Columbia devoted to molecular neural science.
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In collaboration with David Glanzman and Craig Bailey, Eric Kandel identified CREB as being a protein involved in long-term memory storage.
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Some synaptic changes observed by Eric Kandel's laboratory provide examples of Hebbian theory.
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The Eric Kandel lab has performed important experiments using transgenic mice as a system for investigating the molecular basis of memory storage in the vertebrate hippocampus.
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Since 1974, Eric Kandel actively contributes to science as a member of the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University.
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Eric Kandel is well known for the textbooks he has helped write, such as Principles of Neural Science.
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Eric Kandel has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1974.
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Eric Kandel has been at Columbia University since 1974 and lives in New York City.
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When Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, it was said in Vienna that he was an "Austrian" Nobel, something he found "typically Viennese: very opportunistic, very disingenuous, somewhat hypocritical".
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Eric Kandel said it was "certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel".
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Eric Kandel proposed a symposium on the response of Austria to Nazism.
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Eric Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city, similar to Carl Djerassi.