Eric Kandel

Eric Richard Kandel ( born November 7, 1929 in Vienna ) is an American neuroscientist Austrian origin. He was awarded in 2000 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

• 4.1 Filmography

Life

Youth and studies

Eric Kandel was born in 1929 as the second son of the toy merchant Hermann Kandel and his wife Charlotte, née Zimels. After the "Anschluss " of Austria by the Nazis in 1938 had Eric massive problems in everyday life: In the classroom, no child talked more with him, the Jews. 1939 Kandel had to emigrate with his family to the United States because of anti-Semitism in Austria had become life-threatening. "I had fear to cross the street, but I went with my 14 year old brother across the Atlantic ," he reported in 2009 on German television.

The rest of his primary school years he spent on the yeshiva in Flatbush, a borough of New York until he joined in 1944 at the Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where he began to take an interest in history and literature. There he was, to act as one of two students who were selected from more than 1,400 applicants a scholarship to study at Harvard University. In 1945 he became an American citizen.

The neuroscience Kandel came across a befriended fellow student whose parents were staunch supporters of the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis. So Sigmund Freud was the cause of Kandel's interest in the biology of motivation as well as the conscious and unconscious memory. He was as a psychoanalyst, as Freud himself, who believes that all mental processes and ultimately symptoms are physiological processes in the brain. Accordingly, he is engaged in, among other things has always been the question of how a successful psychoanalytic treatment changes the brain.

Research

In the fall of 1952 Kandel moved to New York University to study medicine and eventually become a psychiatrist / psychoanalyst. Towards the end of his studies, he decided, however, unlike most other psychiatrists of his time, not psychological, but to examine the biological processes of the brain in more detail and explore. During this time he met his future wife, Denise Bystryn.

A short time later he began at Columbia University in the laboratory of Harry Grundfest (1904-1983), a New York neurobiologists to investigate. The other researchers with whom Kandel worked there, were engaged in reflection on the highly technical recording of electrical activity of the relatively small neurons of the brains of vertebrates.

After he had begun to work through the difficult field of electrophysiology of the cerebral cortex, he was very impressed by the progress made ​​with Stephen W. Kuffler a more accessible system by experiments. This isolated neurons from marine invertebrates to then reuse.

1957 moved Kandel Laboratory of Neurophysiology of the National Institutes of Health, and drove there with his work on electrophysiological recordings in neurons from the region of the hippocampus continues, especially to find out whether the hippocampus in the process of storing memories in the brain and the self- remembering is directly involved. However, he could find no evidence that the hippocampus is responsible for memory ability of human beings. He realized that the memory had to be related to the synaptic connections between neurons, and that the hippocampus with its complex linkages was not well suited to explore the exact function of synapses. He knew also that similar behavioral studies, for example by Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch had proved at least a small ability to learn in all animals. So he decided to conduct his experiments on a less complex species, so as to facilitate its electrophysiological analyzes at synapses. He believed that he could then transfer the results of his studies on man and his brain. This decision was not without risk, since many - especially the elderly - biologists thought that could be discovered about human memory ability by studying the physiology of invertebrates not much.

Aplysia californica

1962 Kandel went to Paris to be there with the California sea hare ( Aplysia californica ) to deal with a sea snail. He had found that simple forms of learning such as sensitization, as well as classical and operant conditioning can also be studied at individual ganglia of Aplysia.

While the behavior of a single ganglion cell was observed, could be an axon, leading to the ganglion are stimulated and so act as a tactile stimulus, while another axon could be used as a pain stimulus. Here, the other followed in case of natural stimuli in vertebrates sequence should be adhered to.

Electrophysiological changes that are triggered by the interacting stimuli could then be attributed to specific synapses. 1965 Kandel published the results of his studies.

New York Medical School

Later Kandel took a post Department of Physiology and Psychiatry of the New York Medical School, where he helped to establish the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior Sciences. Here he started with several colleagues research on short-and long -term memory.

1981 succeeded to the members of the research team to extend the Aplysia system on a study of classical conditioning, which ultimately helped to bridge the gap, which, between the simple forms of learning that has been associated with less developed animals such as invertebrates and to close the complex learning processes had opened vertebrates.

In addition to the fundamental behavioral research, the researchers also observed the networking of the various nerve cells types that are involved in the learning process. This allowed a detailed analysis of the synapse, that are modified by learning in animals. The laboratory results supported the hypothesis that learning is a functional change in the effectiveness of previously existing links.

Molecular changes in the learning process

Since 1966 James Schwartz collaborated with Kandel on a biochemical analysis of changes in nerve cells, which have to do with learning and memory. At this time, it was known that the storage of things in long-term memory, other than in short-term memory, the production of specific proteins requires. In 1972, she came to the realization that in the ganglia of Aplysia under conditions that cause the storage in short-term memory, the second messenger cAMP is produced. In 1974 it was found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is involved in the production of cAMP, molecular can directly lead to a sensitization to a particular reflex.

1983 helped Kandel, the build Howard Hughes Medical Institute for Molecular Neuroscience at Columbia University. With his laboratory colleagues, he went on to identify the proteins that are to be made to convert short-term memory into long term memory. In collaboration with other researchers of the transcription factor CREB ( cAMP response element binding protein engl. ) was discovered and proved its role as a long-term memory for a Contributing protein. A consequence of the activation of CREB is an increase in the number of synaptic connections. It was concluded that the short-term memory is a sequence of functional changes in existing synapses and long-term memory seen from a change in the total number of synapses.

Some of the synaptic changes that have been discovered in Kandel's laboratory, are examples of learning processes according to the Hebbian rule. Thus describes one of the publications ( Activity -dependent presynaptic facilitation and hebbian LTP are Both required and interact falling on classical conditioning in Aplysia ) the role of Hebbian learning in the Aplysia siphon - withdrawal reflex.

In addition, important experiments were carried out with artificially genmutierten mice to search for the molecular basis of memory ability in the hippocampus of vertebrates in the laboratory. Kandel's original conjecture that certain learning mechanisms show up in all living creatures, has proved to be correct. It was found that neurotransmitters, second messengers, protein kinases, ion channels, and transcription factors such as CREB are involved both in vertebrates and in invertebrates in learning and storing operations.

Since 1974, Eric Kandel member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. From 1980 to 1981 he was president of the Society for Neuroscience. In 1983, Albert Lasker Award for the Kandel Basic Medical Research, a 1987 Gairdner Foundation International Award and the 1988 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing. The following year he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (National Academy of Sciences since 2008 ). In 1992 he received the first Jean -Louis Signoret - Prize. In 2000, Eric R. Kandel was awarded together with the Swede Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard of Americans Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. Kandel is also a carrier of the German order Pour le Mérite for Arts and Science and the Austrian Badge of Honour for Science and Art. In 1997 he received the Ralph W. Gerard Prize -. In 2008 he was awarded the Honorary Award of the Viktor Frankl Institute of the City of Vienna; 2009, the honorary citizenship of the city of Vienna, he was awarded. In 2012 he received the Great Silver Medal with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria. On June 6, 2013, he received the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book of 2012. 2013 he also became a foreign member of the Royal Society.

The Hertie Foundation awards 75,000 euros Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize.

Quote

" [ ... ] At the moment I dream of Vienna, the city where I was born and from which I was expelled as a child. I grew up there this year Freeman, a bittersweet moment. I dream that Austria worked up his past. The integrity and candor, examines the Hitler era with Germany and has a molded democracy is exemplary. From such transparency is in Austria to feel nothing. I dream of scientists, especially young Jewish scientists who come back to Vienna. That the University of Vienna, a moral authority that is located on a part of the ring road which was named after the anti-Semite Karl Lueger is not to accept. This former mayor of Vienna, Hitler had only shown that you can win elections with anti-Semitism. It lost so much. I would like to rebuild a Jewish community in Vienna. All right, you call that bonkers. "

Writings

• Cellular basis of behavior: an introduction to behavioral neurobiology. Freeman, San Francisco 1976.
• Behavioral biology of Aplysia: A Contribution to the Comparative Study of Opisthobranch Molluses. Freeman, San Francisco 1979.
• Edited by James H. Schwartz: Principles of neural science. Elsevier, New York 1981.
• Molecular neurobiology in neurology and psychiatry. Raven, New York 1987.
• Edited by James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessel: Essentials of neural science and behavior. Appleton & Lange, Norwalk 1995. Neuroscience: an introduction. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg / Berlin / Oxford 1996, ISBN 3-86025-391-3.

• Memory. The nature of remembering. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg / Berlin / Oxford 1999, ISBN 3-8274-0522- X.

• In search of memory. The emergence of a new science of the mind. Siedler, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88680-842-4.

• Psychiatry, psychoanalysis and the new biology of mind. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-58451-0.

• The era of knowledge: Exploring the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain of the Viennese Modernism to the present. Siedler, Munich 2012, ISBN 3-88680-945-5.