Eric R. Kandel life and biography

Eric R. Kandel is an American neuropsychiatrist who was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.

Kandel is professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia. Kandel authored In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (WW Norton), which chronicles his life and research. The book was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology.

Eric R. Kandel spent his childhood in Vienna, where he saw the violence wrought by Austria's pro-Nazi laws and the viciousness of Kristallnacht. His family narrowly escaped the country with nothing but their lives, only days before World War II began. Resettling in America, Kandel attended a public school in Brooklyn, later studied psychiatry, neurology, and biochemistry, and spent most of his career at Columbia University. In his most famous research, using sea slugs and mice, he showed the crucial role of synapses in memory and learning.

His wife, Denise Kandel, is a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University and chief of substance abuse epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She answered the phone when the Nobel Institute called at 5:00 one autumn morning in 2000, and said she was able to understand only her husband's name and the word "Stockholm". He shared that year's Nobel Prize in Medicine with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard, who conducted related research in their own laboratories. Kandel is also a co-founder of Memory Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company which researches diseases of the central nervous system.

Awards:

◦ Dickson Prize 1982
◦ Lasker Award 1983 (with V.B. Mountcastle)
◦ National Medal of Science 1988
◦ Wolf Prize in Medicine 1999
◦ Nobel Prize for Medicine 2000 (with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard)
◦ Naturalized US Citizen
◦ American Academy of Arts and Sciences
◦ American Philosophical Society
◦ Federation of American Scientists Board of Sponsors
◦ Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (1984-)
◦ National Academy of Sciences


Here is a list of Eric R. Kandel's books:

◦ Kandel, Eric R. (1976), Cellular Basis of Behaviour: An Introduction to Behavioural Neurobiology
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (1978), A Cell - Biological Approach to Learning
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (1979), Behavioural Bio of Aplysia: Origin & Evolution
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (1987), Molecular Neurobiology in Neurology and Psychiatry
◦ Kandel, Eric R.; Jessell, Thomas M.; Schwartz, James H (1995), Essentials of Neural Science and Behaviour
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (2005), Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (2007), In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (2012), The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (2016), Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures
◦ Kandel, Eric R. (2018), The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

Read more