A Jewish childhood in Vienna
Erich Richard Kandel was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929. His parents were Jews from Galicia who had come to Vienna as young people during the First World War: his mother, Charlotte Zimels, from a well-educated family in Kolomea, and his father, Herman Kandel, from a poor family in the small town of Olesko near Lviv. They married in 1923, and Herman opened a small toy store. Eric and his older brother Lewis grew up in an apartment at Severingasse 8 in the 9th district, not far from Sigmund Freud’s home. The family celebrated Passover at his grandparents’ house and spent Augusts in a village in Lower Austria.
Kandel’s parents loved Vienna, its dialect and culture, even though antisemitism was a constant feature of life there. Jews made up nearly a fifth of the city’s population and half of its doctors, and Kandel would later describe the period of his early childhood as the last flowering of Austrian Jewish intellectual life.
The year under Nazi rule
In March 1938 Hitler marched into Austria to cheering crowds. The day after, every one of Eric’s non-Jewish classmates except one girl stopped speaking to him, and in the park he was taunted and beaten. On Kristallnacht in November 1938, two days after his ninth birthday, the family was evicted from their apartment so it could be looted, and his father was rounded up with hundreds of other Jewish men, released only because he had fought for Austria-Hungary in the First World War. When they returned home, everything of value was gone, including the toys Eric had received for his birthday.
His mother’s brother in New York sent affidavits of support, and the family left in stages: his grandparents in February 1939, Eric and Lewis in April, and his parents in September, just days before the Second World War broke out. Kandel later wrote that this last year in Vienna probably shaped his lifelong interest in how people behave, why ordinary people can turn vicious, and how emotionally charged memories become burned into the mind.
Brooklyn, Harvard and psychoanalysis
The family settled in Brooklyn. His grandfather, a religious and scholarly man, tutored him in Hebrew so that he could win a scholarship to the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where Eric studied from 1939 to 1944 and learned to read the Bible in Hebrew. His father worked in a toothbrush factory and later opened a small clothing store on Church Avenue, which paid for his son’s education. At Erasmus Hall High School Eric edited the sports pages, ran track and was one of two students in a class of about 1,400 admitted to Harvard, on a scholarship.
At Harvard he studied history and literature and wrote his honours thesis on how three German writers responded to National Socialism. A friendship with Anna Kris, whose parents were psychoanalysts from Freud’s circle, drew him to psychoanalysis. To become an analyst he went to New York University School of Medicine in 1952, intending to become a psychiatrist. By the end of medical school he had decided that the mind had to be understood through the biology of the brain.
Choosing a sea slug
At the National Institutes of Health from 1957, Kandel and Alden Spencer made some of the first recordings from inside nerve cells of the hippocampus, the brain region that the famous patient H.M. had shown to be vital for forming new memories. But the cells themselves did not reveal how memory worked. Kandel concluded that memory must lie in the connections between cells, the synapses, and that he needed a much simpler animal to study them.
After considering crayfish, lobsters, flies and worms, he chose Aplysia, a giant marine snail with a small number of unusually large nerve cells, many of which can be recognised individually from animal to animal. Many senior scientists doubted that a snail could teach anything about human memory. In 1962 Kandel took his wife Denise and their infant son to Paris to learn the animal in the laboratory of Ladislav Tauc. He returned to Harvard, moved to New York University in 1965 and in 1974 became founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, where he has worked ever since.
How a memory is made
With colleagues including Irving Kupfermann, Vincent Castellucci, Tom Carew and the biochemist James Schwartz, Kandel mapped the simple circuit that makes Aplysia pull in its gill when touched. They showed that when the snail learns, for example to react more strongly after a shock to its tail, the strength of specific synapses in that circuit changes, and that these changes last as long as the memory does. Learning, in other words, physically alters the connections between nerve cells.
They then traced the chemistry. A short-term memory, lasting minutes, comes from the messenger serotonin raising levels of cyclic AMP in the nerve cell, which activates an enzyme that strengthens existing synapses; in 1980 Kandel and Schwartz showed this with Paul Greengard. A long-term memory is different. Repeated training sends signals to the cell’s nucleus, where they switch on a gene regulator called CREB; new proteins are made, and the nerve cell grows new synaptic connections. That is why long-term memories need new proteins, and why practice spaced out over time helps them stick. In the 1990s his laboratory used genetically engineered mice to show that similar molecules underlie memory in the mammalian hippocampus.
From snails to patients
Kandel’s work turned memory from a philosophical puzzle into a problem that can be studied in molecules, and it gave medicine targets to aim at. The pathways he described, from cyclic AMP to CREB, are now standard subjects of research on memory disorders, and drug developers have tried to strengthen them to treat memory decline. In 2013 his team reported that a shortage of a protein called RbAp48 in part of the hippocampus contributes to ordinary age-related memory loss, and that this form of forgetting is distinct from Alzheimer’s disease; raising the protein reversed the problem in mice. The work suggested that the two conditions may need different treatments.
As a psychiatrist, he has also applied the biology of learning to mental illness. His laboratory has studied mouse models of the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, and in 2008 it showed that teaching mice a sense of learned safety had an antidepressant effect comparable to medication, a finding relevant to anxiety, post-traumatic stress and depression. His textbook Principles of Neural Science, first published with Schwartz in 1981, has trained generations of doctors and neuroscientists, and he helped found Columbia’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science and co-directed its Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.
Jewish identity and Vienna
Kandel has written openly about his Jewish identity and about the Vienna that expelled him. His education at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, his grandfather’s scholarship and his wife Denise, a Jewish girl who survived the war hidden in a French convent while her parents hid in the southwest of France, are all part of the story he tells. When he won the Nobel Prize in 2000 and Austrian media hailed an Austrian winner, he replied that it was not an Austrian Nobel but a Jewish-American one.
When Austria’s president Thomas Klestil asked how things could be made right, Kandel asked for the renaming of the Vienna boulevard named after the antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger, scholarships to bring Jewish students and researchers back to the city, and an honest public reckoning with Austria’s response to Nazism. The Lueger section of the Ringstrasse was renamed Universitätsring in 2012. Kandel later accepted honorary citizenship of Vienna, and his 2012 book The Age of Insight celebrates the Vienna of Freud, Klimt and Schiele.
Teacher, writer and collector
Kandel married Denise Bystryn, a sociologist, in 1956; they have a son, Paul, and a daughter, Minouche, born in 1965. The couple lived for decades in a house in Riverdale in the Bronx overlooking the Hudson, collecting French art nouveau and Austrian and German Expressionist art, an interest he once suspected was an attempt to recapture a lost youth. His memoir, In Search of Memory (2006), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and became a documentary film, and he became known for his red bow ties and his talks for general audiences.
Kandel has said he owes an enormous debt to his parents, who rebuilt their lives in middle age in a country whose language his father could not speak, and to his brother Lewis, who first introduced him to classical music and the joy of learning; Lewis died in 1979.
He was a senior investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1984 until he retired from Columbia in 2022, at the age of 92.
Legacy
Kandel shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard for discoveries about signal transduction in the nervous system. His deeper achievement was to show that memory, the thread that makes us who we are, is written in the physical connections of the brain, and that the same molecules do the writing in a snail and in a person. Every effort today to protect memory in old age, to understand trauma, or to treat the cognitive symptoms of mental illness starts from that insight, first glimpsed by a boy whose memories of Vienna in 1938 never faded.
Sources & further reading
Eric R. Kandel, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Eric Kandel: From Refugee to Nobel Prize Winner, Columbia University Irving Medical Center · A Major Cause of Age-Related Memory Loss Identified, Kavli Foundation (Columbia University release, 2013) · Eric Kandel, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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