Media

• Publications
• Latest News

UCD Ulysses Medal for groundbreaking memory scientist

In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the understanding of memory, Nobel prize-winning scientist Professor Eric R Kandel has been awarded the UCD Ulysses Medal.

“Professor Kandel’s story is one of a lifetime dedicated to investigating the mechanism of memory formation; a lifetime of research achievements in his quest, as he once said himself, to understand the brain - one cell at a time,” said Dr Hugh Brady, the President of UCD, who presented the award. “This award is in recognition of his outstanding contribution to neurobiology, an inspirational story to set our resolve as scientists and researchers.”

Professor Kandel (pictured right) accepted the award in front of an audience of more than 250 people at UCD before delivering the plenary lecture at the 9th annual UCD Conway Institute Festival of Research and Innovation on Thursday, September 17th 2009. Hs lecture entitled: The long and short of long-term memory, outlined his scientific work and discoveries which culminated in the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (jointly awarded to Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard).

The (three) Nobel Laureates, made pioneering discoveries concerning one type of signal transduction between nerve cells in the brain, known as slow synaptic transmission. The discoveries have been crucial to the understanding of the normal function of the brain and how disturbances in this signal transduction can give rise to neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Born in Vienna in 1929, Kandel immigrated to America before the start of World War II. He attributes his interest in the mind, in how people behave, the unpredictability of motivation, and the persistence of memory, to his experiences during his last year in Nazi-occupied Vienna. He also remains passionately grateful for the freedoms offered by the United States and its academic institutions which, he says, made the Nobel Prize possible for him. He is currently Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science and Principal Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University, New York.

“Few things are more exciting and stimulating to the imagination than making a new finding, no matter how modest,” states Professor Kandel in his autobiography: In Search of Memory (Norton & Company, NY, 2006). “A new finding allows one to see for the first time a part of nature – a small piece of the puzzle of how something functions.”

“I think it is important to be bold, to tackle difficult problems, especially those that appear initially to be messy and unstructured. I think it is important to define a problem or a set of interrelated problems that has a long trajectory.”

Listen to the Ulysses lecture - The Long and the Short of Long Term Memory

Biography
Professor Kandel attended Harvard on a scholarship and majored in 19th and 20th century European history and literature. During his undergraduate years, he became fascinated by psychoanalysis and the insights this provided into the mind, particularly the irrationality of human motivation. So much so that in 1951 he took a summer course in Harvard on introductory chemistry and was accepted into New York University Medical School in order to study psychiatry and become a psychoanalyst.

During his senior year in medical school, his fascination with the biological basis of medical practice spurred him to take an elective period at Columbia University with Harry Grundfest where he learnt the first cellular techniques for studying learning and memory. He returned to work in the Grundfest laboratory during his internship and was nominated by his mentor for a position at the laboratory of neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health.
At the NIH, Professor Kandel began exploring the hippocampus in cellular terms using intracellular recordings but soon concluded that exploring this complex area would require a more reductionist approach.

He settled on Aplysia, the giant marine snail, as a model.  Aplysia offered three major technical advantages: its nervous system has a small number of cells, the cells are unusually large, and many of the cells are invariant and identifiable as unique individuals. He arranged to join the Paris laboratory of Ladislav Tauc as a postdoctoral fellow once he had completed his psychiatric residency training. At that time, Tauc was one of the two people in the world working on Aplysia.

Even during his residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center of the Harvard Medical School, Eric managed to do some research in his spare time. He obtained the first intracellular recording from hypothalamic neuroendocrine cells and found that these hormone-releasing cells had all the electrical properties of normal nerve cells.

Kandel’s initial work on Aplysia revealed synaptic changes that paralleled the behavioral changes seen in experiments on intact animals. He soon realised that to do effective science, he could not combine basic research and a clinical practice in psychoanalysis. So, in 1965, he left Harvard to take up the position of associate professor at the New York University Medical School where along with colleagues Alden Spencer and James Schwartz, Kandel developed the first group in the United States devoted to both cellular neurobiology and behaviour.

In 1974, Eric was invited to join the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University as the founding director of the Centre for Neurobiology and Behaviour. During this time, he organised the neuroscience curriculum and edited the standard textbook in the field, Principles of Neural Science. 

In 1983, he resigned this directorship to become a senior investigator in the newly established Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute at Columbia. Together with fellow Hughes investigators James Schwartz and Richard Axel, he formed a core devoted to molecular neural science at the Institute.
Today, Eric Kandel's research group at the Centre for Neurobiology and Behaviour are studying selected examples of several major forms of memory storage.