- Person
- Eric Kandel
- Lived
- b. 1929
- Field
- Neuroscience of memory
- From
- Austrian-born American
The story
Eric Kandel was nine when the Nazis took over Vienna in 1938. His classmates stopped speaking to him, his family’s home was looted on Kristallnacht, and in 1939 the Jewish family escaped to New York. Kandel later wrote that those vivid, frightening memories helped draw him to a question that had defeated scientists for centuries: how does the brain store a memory?
Trained as a psychiatrist, he began by recording from cells in the hippocampus, the brain region known to be vital for memory, but decided he needed a simpler system. In the early 1960s he chose Aplysia, a giant sea snail with only about 20,000 large nerve cells, many of which can be identified individually. With colleagues at New York University and then at Columbia University, he mapped the small circuit that makes the snail withdraw its gill when touched and showed that when the animal learns, specific connections in that circuit, the synapses, become stronger or weaker. Learning physically changes the wiring of the nervous system.
Kandel’s team then worked out the chemistry. A short-term memory, lasting minutes, comes from the messenger serotonin triggering a chain of signals that briefly strengthens existing synapses. A long-term memory requires repetition: the signals travel to the nerve cell’s nucleus and switch on a gene regulator called CREB, new proteins are made, and the cell grows new synaptic connections. That explains why long-term memory depends on making new proteins and why spaced practice helps us remember. In the 1990s his laboratory showed, using genetically engineered mice, that the same molecules are at work in the mammalian hippocampus.
Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His findings turned memory into something that can be studied and targeted with medicines. In 2013 his group identified a protein, RbAp48, whose loss contributes to normal age-related memory decline and showed that this condition is distinct from Alzheimer’s disease, a step toward different treatments for each.
Why it matters
Kandel’s discovery of the molecular steps of memory storage guides today’s research into age-related memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, trauma and the cognitive symptoms of mental illness.
About Eric Kandel
Vienna-born refugee and psychiatrist who showed how memories are stored as changes in the connections between nerve cells, guiding research on memory loss and mental illness.
Sources
- Eric R. Kandel, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- A Major Cause of Age-Related Memory Loss Identified Kavli Foundation (Columbia University release)
- Eric Kandel Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.