Eric Kandel

Origins and early life

Erich Richard Kandel was born in Vienna on 7 November 1929, the younger son of Herman Kandel, who owned a small toy store, and of Charlotte Zimels, both of whom had come to the city from Galicia as children. His parents were Jews who loved Vienna, the family celebrated Passover at his grandparents' home, and after Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 every one of his non-Jewish classmates stopped speaking to him.

Work and career

On Kristallnacht, in November 1938, his father was rounded up with hundreds of other Jewish men and the family's home was looted, and in April 1939 Eric and his brother Lewis reached New York, their parents following in September. In Brooklyn his grandfather tutored him in Hebrew, and by the time he left the Yeshiva of Flatbush in 1944 he had read the five books of Moses and the Prophets in Hebrew. He studied history and literature at Harvard, where friends from Freud's Viennese circle drew him toward psychoanalysis, and after medical school at New York University he married the sociologist Denise Bystryn in 1956.

After studying the hippocampus at the National Institutes of Health from 1957, he chose a simpler animal, the giant marine snail Aplysia, with few and large nerve cells, and in 1962 went to Paris to learn it from Ladislav Tauc. At New York University from 1965 and at Columbia University from 1974, where he founded the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, he showed that learning strengthens the synapses between particular cells of the snail.

Short-term memory, he found, comes from the phosphorylation of proteins at the synapse, while long-term memory needs new proteins, switched on through cyclic AMP and the gene regulator CREB, and the growth of new connections. In 2000 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard, “for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system”.