Fascination of Science, page 40
You have three daughters. Did you spend much time with them when they were kids?
They are daughters, and I don't have a close relationship with them. My wife took care of the kids. Back in Japan, I also never helped her at home, but when we came to America, I was amazed how totally different family life is here. Everyone is equal; there is no difference. In Japan, the man is supposed to concentrate on work, whereas in the United States, family life is of equal importance. So, now that I am living in the United States, I try to take a different approach. In Japan, we are very bad at those things, but nowadays even there you have to stay home on the weekends.
Do you have any other interests besides science?
No, my hobby is thinking. That started in childhood, and it hasn't changed. Already at the age of 3 or 4, I was sitting alone in front of the ocean, watching the ships pass by. And in the photographs from my time at elementary school, I was always standing on my own, thinking deeply about some problem until I had found a solution. One month, two months—however long it took. And for thinking you have to be alone, and it has to be quiet.
Do you plan to return to Japan when you retire?
I lived in Japan for forty-five years. And I have to say, I miss the Japanese food! It is much better for me, and also the Japanese culture is better for me. As long as I am still working, though, I won't go back. But after retirement, I don't know.
“Countries that invest intelligently in science do well.”
Eric Kandel | Neuroscience
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Columbia University, New York
Nobel Prize in Medicine 2000
United States
Professor Kandel, as a Jew born in Vienna, you fled Austria at the age of 9, after it was annexed by Germany in 1938. How did you react to this change in circumstances?
I will never forget my experiences in Vienna those last days. People who'd been our friends suddenly turned their back on us and didn't protect us. In fact, they actively turned against us after the Nazis knocked on our door on November 9, Kristallnacht. The Nazis told us we had to leave the apartment for a few days. My mother said, “Take a few things.” So, I took some toiletries and some underwear. My brother, who was five years older, used his brain and took his stamp and coin collections, and all his prize possessions. When we returned five days’ later, nothing of value was left in the apartment. And November 7 had been my birthday, and my father had given me a toy train. It was gone. All my presents had been taken.
Did this traumatic experience alter your outlook on life?
I presume I've always been interested in the brain and in memory because of what happened to me in Vienna. It fascinated me how people who were your friends one day could become your enemies the next. When I went to the park, my former friends would beat me up. My father had to scrub the sidewalk with a toothbrush—it was before the elections and Jews were forced to scrub walls and sidewalks clean of any propaganda about Kurt Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor whom Hitler replaced with himself. It was just awful in Vienna after Hitler came. My memories of that time are very painful.
But you managed to leave the country?
We left without our parents. In 1938, my parents took my brother and me to the train station and we left for Brussels, where we then boarded a ship bound for the United States.
Arriving in the United States for us was like a breath of freedom. My father used to say, “It's difficult being a Jew in Vienna.” That wasn't true in the United States. My grandparents had preceded us to the United States by about four months, so when we arrived, we stayed with them in Brooklyn.
Describe your upbringing. What was the atmosphere like, especially after your parents joined you?
We were very poor. My father started out as a door-to-door salesman. Then he opened a shop, and ultimately earned enough to buy the small building, which in addition to the store had two apartments above it. We occupied one apartment as our living quarters and we rented out the other apartment, which was on the top floor.
My upbringing in New York was wonderful. I felt a real sense of freedom living in the United States that I had not felt in my years in Vienna.
Where did you go to school and how did that influence your thinking?
My uncle Berman registered me in a school in Brooklyn, near where we lived. But I felt uncomfortable there. Nobody else looked Jewish, so I thought some of the students might beat me up. My grandfather, an Orthodox Jew but very progressive, helped me learn Hebrew, which allowed me to transfer to a Hebrew school, the Yeshiva of Flatbush.
Asking questions is a wonderful Jewish tradition. Jews are very curious and emphasize education. They excel in intellectual areas requiring intellectual commitment. For example, although only 0.2 percent of the world's population is Jewish, 22 percent of Nobel laureates have been Jewish.
Afterwards, I attended a high school called Erasmus High School. In my senior year, Mr. Campagna, my history teacher, asked me, “Where are you applying to college?” And I said, “Brooklyn College. My brother's going there.” He said, “Why don't you apply to Harvard?” So, I discussed it with my father, who said, “Look, we have just spent five dollars for you to apply to Brooklyn College. . . . I've never heard of Harvard, so Brooklyn College is just fine.” I went back to Mr. Campagna, and he gave me the five dollars I needed to apply to Harvard. I ended up winning a scholarship to go there. I mean, this is the United States for you. It's absolutely fantastic.
What influenced the direction of your university studies?
When I first went to Harvard, I wanted to understand what had happened to me in Vienna. So, I majored in history and literature, studying the works of three German writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger. These writers held different positions on the political spectrum of National Socialism.
While at Harvard, I fell in love with Anna Kris, whose parents were the psychoanalysts Marianne Rie and Ernst Kris. Ernst Kris said to me, “Look, you're not going to understand how the mind works by reading literature. You have to study people; you have to study the mind; you have to turn to psychoanalysis.” So, I started to read Sigmund Freud and found him fascinating. That motivated me to go on to medical school, with the idea of becoming a psychoanalyst.
When did you start to focus on the brain and memory?
In 1952, I started at the New York University Medical School. My chosen elective was on the brain. I studied the hippocampus because I wanted to understand memory, which is so critical to human beings.
Later, at the U.S. National Institutes of health, I was the first person to electrophysiologically record successfully from the mammalian hippocampal pyramidal neurons. I studied these cells for six months with a colleague, Alden Spencer. We learned a bit about how these cells functioned, but we didn't learn anything about how memory functions occur.
It took a long time until your research found success. Did you ever experience any doubts?
At first, I thought about dropping out, that I wasn't getting anywhere with the work and it wasn't the right direction for me to take. But then I grew in self-confidence. The first few times things went well I thought I was lucky. After about the fourth or fifth time that happened, I realized that maybe I was good at this, maybe I could do this for the rest of my career.
What change in your thinking allowed you to reach that pivotal moment in your research?
I started to take a reductionist approach to doing science. I selected to work on a simple animal, a marine slug, Aplysia, with a simple nervous system. In this sea slug, not only are there relatively few nerve cells but the nerve cells are gigantic and visible to the naked eye. I was able to work out a neural circuit of a simple reflex behavior in terms of specific identified cells.
I found that this very simple reflex in the sea slug could be modified by learning. In this way, I discovered that when an animal learns something, the connections between the nerve cells change. I could actually see the anatomical change, and said, “Wow.”
In 2000, you received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for your research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons, sharing the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. Was this your eureka moment?
My eureka moment was when I first realized that learning produces anatomical changes in the brain. I wanted to go one step deeper, not just to a descriptive level but down to a mechanistic level to see what happens in the brain. With short-term memory, there is a functional change but no change in the anatomy. But if you do something that produces a long-term memory, there is an anatomical change in the brain; you grow new synaptic connections. If you forget, you lose those synaptic connections.
That is why I won the Nobel Prize. I was the first person to work out the basic biological mechanisms of learning and memory. Neural biology and psychology belong together—neural biology is a biological underpinning of behavior.
“I presume I've always been interested in the brain and in memory because of what happened to me in Vienna.”
You also were teaching at the time. Were you a good teacher?
I loved to teach, and I was a good teacher. I wanted the classroom to be like a theater—that the students would listen to me, not just sit there, and take notes. So, I gave the students an outline of my lectures so they could just sit back and enjoy it. I ultimately turned those lectures into a textbook, Principles of Neural Science.
You've dedicated your life to this research. Do you have any regrets?
I've worked most days and part of many a night, and I derive great pleasure from doing the research. People watch television at night. I hardly ever watch TV; I write most nights. As I say to my friends, “How can I know what I think unless I read what I write?”
Science is so engrossing. I have on occasion been offered attractive leadership jobs, such as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at a Harvard-affiliated hospital. But my wife, Denise, could not see me doing that. She would simply say, “Throw your career away for an administrative job?” Denise has always thought I have a good mind and should dedicate my time to research. Whenever a chairmanship offer would come along, Denise always pulled me back.
Her only objection to my research was that I often spent too much time doing it. I remember her once standing in the doorway of my lab, with one of our children. “Eric,” she said, “you can't keep on doing this. You're ignoring us, and you're only paying attention to your work and not paying any attention to your family.” I felt terrible. I didn't feel I was ignoring them, but I wasn't spending as much time with them as I should. And I improved a bit.
Despite our disagreements about my time distribution, I wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize without Denise's help. She has had tremendous confidence in me. She thinks I have a good mind. She may be wrong, but I'm not going to disabuse her of that at this point in our life together.
How has your research changed over the years?
When I started out, few people studied the brain. It was just too complicated. Now, there are more people working on the brain than any other organ of the body. There are powerful imaging techniques, so you can study effectively different kinds of learning processes, both in people and in experimental animals.
We know that different regions of the cerebral cortex have different functions, so we can focus on one region when we study visual perception, for example, and another when we study hearing.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports you. How does that arrangement work?
Investigators supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have to be re-examined every five years, which is demanding. You have to write an essay on your scientific accomplishments and submit the list of relevant publications. You then have to give a talk on your work of the past five years, and then they quiz you thoroughly.
You have to take it all very seriously. I think it's fair, though. Why should different people be subject to different standards? Everyone's only as good as their last movie. I'm going to be 90 years old this year. I could stop, but I really like to work. In America, you can go on working as a professor, as long as your work is good. You're reviewed every few years, and if you pass the review, you can just carry on.
What are you researching now?
I'm researching age-related memory loss—that is, how you can best prevent or counteract memory deterioration in older people. I've found that a hormone called osteocalcin, released from the bones, is a very effective memory booster. When you walk, you release osteocalcin, and it helps your memory. So, one of the best things aging people can do is to walk. Every day I walk to work and back in the hope that this will help me manage age-related memory loss. It's been effective in experimental animals, so maybe it will work for me as well.
What will happen after you die?
When you're dead, there's nothing else. Your soul doesn't live on. What will live on is my children, my grandchildren, my contributions, my books, and my papers. I'm proud of what I've achieved. I've had a good career. In terms of my contribution to society, I was able to tackle certain problems at the molecular level that at the time people thought couldn't be tackled, like learning and memory, and I showed that they could be studied in depth.
What advice would you give a young person considering studying science?
You should have an inquisitive mind and go to a good school. It's such a rewarding and satisfying career. You play with your ideas, you find ways to test them thoroughly. It's never boring.
It's important to choose a profession you enjoy. A career doesn't turn out well unless you work hard at it, and you will not put a lot of work into it unless you enjoy it.
How does science personally make you happy?
It's extremely gratifying to make a new finding, a new discovery, no matter how modest. Constantly solving problems and understanding how things work are very satisfying. In some cases, you may be the first person in the world to have seen this little part of the universe.
You are now an honorary doctor in Vienna. Have you made peace with the past?
When I won the Nobel Prize, I got a lot of calls from Vienna claiming that this was a Viennese Nobel Prize. I said, “You've got this wrong: this is an American Nobel Prize, an American-Jewish Nobel Prize.” So, the Austrian government wrote to me and asked, “How can we make things right?” I asked them to hold a symposium in Vienna about Austria's interaction with Hitler's National Socialism. The symposium was then published as a book. We compared Austrian attitudes to German attitudes. It was a productive interaction, and I made friends, which made visiting Vienna more enjoyable.
And I was able to convince the Austrians to do something for the Jewish community—they paid the Jews to compensate for some of their losses from that terrible time.
Why is science so important?
Science is our hope for the future. We have so many problems haunting society that need a solution, and science is one way to find those solutions. Countries that invest intelligently in science do well. It's important for a country to be serious about science and to encourage its growth.
Can you describe your typical day?
I meet with the people from my lab and discuss their work with them. Healthwise, I walk to and from work most days. I love our apartment. We have a lot of art in it. I like to swim and play tennis on the weekend. I eat reasonably well. I never eat meat. I much prefer to eat fish and vegetables.
You are a scientist, yet you're interested in art?
Art and science aren't worlds apart. Artists can be experimental and adopt the same techniques and approaches as scientists do. Scientists can be creative and have artistic sensibilities.
I've been interested in art ever since my days at Harvard, when I took a wonderful course in fine arts in my first year. That really motivated me to go to museums. When I travel to a new city, one of the first things I do is visit any interesting museums.
I'm very interested in works of the Vienna Secession movement that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century—artists such as Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka. It was a special period, which really influenced me. I saw a Kokoschka exhibition the other day, which was wonderful; and I realized once again how extraordinary Kokoschka's work is.
What has been your main guideline in life?
To do the best I can. I mean, I didn't want to starve but money has never been my major objective. My main objective has been to do something interesting intellectually that I enjoy.
Working hard has been a main guideline in my life. I don't give up easily. Nothing gets done unless you stick at it. Practically nothing that is important is easy.
“The more answers you find, the more questions you'll have.”
