J Physiol 588.5 (2010) pp 743–745 743

An Interview with Eric Kandel

Brian RobertsonThe Journal of Physiology, PO Box 502,Cambridge, CB1 0AL, UK

This is the first in a new series, designedto give our readers some insight into thelives of leading physiologists. To uptownNew York, on a typically hot mid-Julyday, to meet and interview Professor EricKandel for The Journal of Physiology. Thetime is set for 3 pm on a Friday after-noon, in his offices at The New York StatePsychiatric Institute, on 40 Haven Avenue(West 168th Street). The building is locatedat one end of a warren (if one can describesuch a huge conglomeration) of buildingsassociated with the New York – PresbyterianHospital and Columbia University MedicalCenter. Here cutting-edge research is carriedout right next to patients. As we get outof the taxi there are people in wheelchairsand dressing gowns coming and going.I guess this is a daily reminder to thebench scientists of what it is ultimatelyall about. Another noticeable point is thatmany of the buildings are named aftermunificent benefactors, a reminder not onlyof the philanthropic nature of many wealthyAmericans, but the fact that big moneytalks and gets big buildings. New Yorkerswithout a National Health plan must begrateful.

We are to meet in Eric’s office on the6th floor and after being warmly welcomedby his extremely efficient and delightfulsecretary Millie Pellan, with a much-neededbottle of cold water, we wait for the greatman to enter.

Bang on time, Eric joins us in his large –but not excessively so – office with fine viewsover the Hudson River. The place is filledwith photographs of family, colleagues,special occasions, certificates and I can spotonly one easel painting in a gilt frame on thewall. This is no showcase of achievementthough, but a working office, where heholds regular meetings with members ofhis laboratory. One gets an immediateimpression of energy and charm from Eric.He is vivacious, certainly, and has a hugeglistening smile that would not look out ofplace in Hollywood. The smile is the brightvisual prelude to a very warm welcomewith his distinctive windmill-in-high-wind

laugh. I had brought my wife Lesley along as‘assistant’, and he makes a tremendous fussof her, commenting immediately on a smallsilver Celtic necklace which reminds him ofsome items in his extensive collection ArtNouveau; immediately, we are aware that weare in the presence of a sophisticated, urbaneand cultured man – he is completely at easedealing with people.

After the traditional pleasantries, I noticedthe clock was ticking, and it was alreadyclear that we were well into our hour-onlyappointment (Millie pins the schedule to theoffice entry – this is a busy man).

Firstly, I thank Eric for his excellentcontributions to the David Hubel andTorsten Wiesel Anniversary Special Issuefor The Journal, where he contributed apersonal memoir (Kandell, 2009a) as wellas a Topical Review (Kandell, 2009b) onsome recent work from his labs on learningand memory in the hippocampus. ‘It wasa pleasure to do so – I have great respectfor these men, and their first joint paper wasindeed a landmark and worth celebrating ’ hesays. We talk a little more about Hubel andWiesel, especially Torsten. ‘He came acrossas the quieter, more reserved of the two in theearly days. I always felt that he was a littleunder Hubel’s shadow. However, later, whenhe became Head of Neurobiology at Harvardhe showed a great deal of inner strength andconfidence, which later became more apparentwhen he joined Rockefeller University in NewYork. He was an outstanding leader andmentor to many young scientists. A brilliantman.’

Brian Robertson (BR). I met him brieflylast year, in Rockefeller, where he stillmaintains an office. I was extremelyimpressed with some of the art he has there;he is very knowledgeable about art andartists.

Eric Kandel (EK). Yes, he has a superband eclectic collection of art. We areboth passionate about art. Sometimes wecompete for the same painting!

BR. I want to come back to your interestin art, but first, tell me a little about yourbackground.

EK. I was born in Vienna on November7 1929. I was the second child. Myparents were not from Vienna, but fromwhat is now Western Ukraine. My fatherestablished a small toy store, where mymother also worked. Vienna at that time

was a wonderful, cultured and cosmopolitancity. All this changed, of course, whenHitler annexed Austria. For obvious reasons,which I go into further in my autobiography,our family had to leave Austria. My brotherand I left for the USA in April 1939and our parents in September 1939, a fewdays before the Second World War started.One of the legacies of my time in Viennawas a profound curiosity concerning theorigins of human behaviour – how coulda society so cultured become so vicious? Ifollowed this thread in my first degree whichwas in History and Literature at HarvardUniversity, where I wrote a dissertationon ‘The attitude toward national socialismof three German writers: Carl Zuckmayer,Hans Carossa, and Ernst Junger’. I came tothe rather depressing conclusion that manyGerman artists, intellectuals and academicssuccumbed too readily and embraced to thedoctrines of Nazism.

As a recent emigre family, we lived inBrooklyn, near my relatives. My father got ajob in a toothbrush factory, but later savedenough to open his own clothing store.We lived above the shop, and the modestincome supported us through school andme through medical school. He worked inthat store until he died in 1978.

BR. You still live in Brooklyn?

EK. No, we live in the Riverdale sectionof the Bronx; my wife and I have livedin the same 150-year-old house for severaldecades. We have wonderful views of theHudson River. I swim in the pool every dayand play tennis regularly. My wife Deniseand I collect avidly: French art nouveaufurniture, vases and lamps, and a good dealof graphic art, especially that of the Austrianand German Expressionists.

BR. To come back to your art collectionagain, what is your favourite work – orrather, since it is hard to choose a favourite,what would you grab if your house were togo on fire? (Heaven forbid.)

EK. Difficult. I think it would be myGustave Klimt!

BR. Fabulous! How lucky you are.

EK. I am getting another one for my 80thbirthday! We collect a good deal – I wouldsay we are addicted. With some of myNobel Prize money we bought a wonderfulapartment on the Left Bank in Paris. Much

C© 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation C© 2010 The Physiological Society DOI: 10.1113/jphysiol.2009.185231

744 Interviews J Physiol 588.5

of our collection is there too. My wife andI are Francophiles (Denise was born inFrance), and we hoped that our children,and now our grandchildren, would be ableto use the apartment too. We try to get therea couple of times a year.

BR. You’ve had a fascinating route to yourpresent position. What would you do if youweren’t, or couldn’t be, a scientist?

EK. Perhaps an historian. Or a galleryowner!

BR. But a scientist you became. Whowould you count as your greatest mentorin science?

EK. There would be a few, but certainlyHarry Grundfest and Dominick Purpura.I did my elective at Columbia Universitywith Grundfest, and there I met and workedwith Dominick. Later, I worked with AldenSpencer, and together we made intracellularrecordings from the hippocampus.

BR. I remember as a PhD student in theearly 80’s, reading about your work onAplysia, and seeing how that was beginningto answer the questions of the molecularmechanisms of memory. I was going to

Australia to do my PhD, and was ditheringwhether to work on the hippocampus,or Aplysia, which were plentiful in theSydney lab. I chose hippocampus, and whilstworking on slices, was amazed to read yourpapers of the 1960’s making recordings fromhippocampal neurons in vivo! I had a hardenough time with slices then. What skill andpatience you guys must have had, and fromdoing that, to take the reductionist approachand go to a simple organism like Aplysiamust have taken some guts.

EK (laughing.) Yes. Eccles was veryagainst a reductionist approach. But therewere superb precedents from the work ofHodgkin and Huxley, Katz, and of courseSteve Kuffler, who was a great inspiration forme. I learned from Kuffler’s scientific papershow biological science should be done – thevalue of matching a scientific question toa suitable preparation. Kuffler taught meto respect the power of invertebrate neuro-biology.

BR. I have encountered a similarsnobbishness about preparations too; onevery distinguished pharmacologist I knewcouldn’t understand why I would giveup hippocampus for sensory neurons andpatch clamp to study GABA, but he would

always slip me the best chemical tools. Ithink it is good to try different things inones career, and certainly for you and theneuroscience community at large, the moveto Aplysia paid off handsomely.

What scientific paper most inspired yourwork?

EK. The classic papers of Hodgkin andHuxley in The Journal of Physiology. Weworshipped those papers. Also the work ofKatz, on spontaneous and evoked release.Wonderful. I think The Journal of Physio-logy made a big mistake though in stickingto alphabetical order for so long; youngAmerican scientists couldn’t understandthat and deserted The Journal for thatreason.

BR. How would you change scienceeducation to produce a more scientificallyliterate population?

EK. I think science is taught wrongly– it comes across as boring, which itisn’t. Communication of science has to beimproved.

BR. What have you sacrificed for science?

EK. Zero. Nothing. Science has given mea wonderful life. I love it. When pressedthough, I said in a speech I gave several yearsago at my birthday party that I could havebeen a better father when I was younger,and been around more. I was so busy then,and often away. So I said in this speech that Igave myself a ‘B’ in parenthood. (Laughing.)Afterwards, one of my children came up andasked when I was promoted to a ‘B’! Theywere joking, of course, but I did miss somevaluable times.

BR. Who is your favourite writer and whichone of their books would you recommend?

EK. Having spent a whole career occupiedwith memory, one would be Proust’smagnificent ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’.He says so much about memory there.

BR. How appropriate – it was he whocoined the phrase, and described so well,‘memoire volontaire’; it fits with your love ofthings French too. Any others?

EK. Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’and Charles Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’. I alsoenjoyed the novel of Siegfried Lenz called‘The German Lesson’. It is a biographicaltreatment of his house arrest in the Nazi

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period. He may have been a Nazi himselfand it is a remarkable story.

BR. What scientific problem currentlyoccupies you?

EK. There are so many! But hereare two, quite different in scope. Ascientific one is the involvement of aprion-like protein in long-term memory.In neurones from Aplysia and mice, weidentified a local ‘marking signal’ forsynaptic facilitation. In Aplysia we foundthat one component of these markingsignals requires local protein synthesis. Aneurone-specific isoform of cytoplasmicpolyadenylation element-binding protein(CPEB) regulates this synaptic proteinsynthesis in an activity-dependent manner.The Aplysia CPEB protein is up-regulatedin activated synapses; it is required formaintenance of long-term facilitation.Fascinatingly, CPEB is an ideal stabilizerbecause it has prion-like properties. Prionproteins have the unusual ability to fold intofunctionally distinct conformations, one ofwhich is self-perpetuating. Our preliminarystudies suggest that conversion of CPEB to aprion-like state in stimulated synapses helpsto maintain long-term synaptic changesassociated with memory storage. It iswonderful to be involved in something soexciting, so potentially important, at mystage of life!

BR. A solid element to memory? I guessthat answers my next question then, whichis if you were marooned on a desert island,

with a simple but adequate laboratory, whatwould you study?

EK. How memories can be perpetuated forthe lifetime of an individual.

BR. How Proustian; you mentioned asecond project?

EK. This is quite different. I amwriting another book (pointing to a largemanuscript on the table). This one isabout the inter-relationships with art andscience, focusing on pre-War Europeanthought. It also includes autism, and thereis some discussion about the art of StephenWiltshire, an autistic savant, who can drawcities from memory. People said I shouldn’tdo this, it is too arrogant (laughing). Perhapsit is, but the age I am, and all I have achieved,permit me to do this. It should come out in2010.

BR. I shall look forward to that. What yousaid reminds me of what the German painterGerhard Richter says, that as he gets older,he gets more ‘sovereignty’ in his work, hegives himself permission to do things that hewouldn’t have done when younger – peopletell you that you can’t do this or that whenyou are young.

EK. Quite right. I have the advantage ofleverage in all sorts of different ways now, soI can use it. I have discussed consciousnesswith the Dalai Lama and Tina Turner!

BR. Tina Turner?

EK (Laughing.) Yes! I was invited on to aGerman television talk show a short timeago. They wanted me to talk about the brainand consciousness, and where it was and soforth. Sitting next to me was this woman Ihad never heard of called Tina Turner. Sheasked me some questions, and afterwardsgave me a big hug and kiss and thanked mefor explaining it all so clearly to her!

BR. Marvellous – what an image. Eric,thank you very much for your time, youhave been most kind. We wish you a happy80th birthday.

Our time, sadly, was up. Eric had a meetingwith one of his group. Gentleman that he is,he showed us to the elevator; we, somewhatelated but exhausted. Age certainly does notdiminish his ardour, and we later had adrink to him enjoying the pairing of TinaTurner and the Nobel Laureate, Arts andScience.

References

Kandel ER (2009a). An introduction to the workof David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. J Physiol587, 2733–2741.

Isabel A, Muzzio IA, Kentros C & Kandel ER(2009b). What is remembered? Role ofattention on the encoding and retrieval ofhippocampal representations. J Physiol 587,2837–2854.

For a sample of Eric Kandel andTina Turner, see YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyX sd4UmBY&feature=related

C© 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation C© 2010 The Physiological Society