In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (46 page)

Libet followed up on Kornhuber’s finding with an experiment in which he asked volunteers to lift a finger whenever they felt the urge to do so. He placed an electrode on a volunteer’s skull and confirmed a readiness potential about 1 second before the person lifted his or her finger. He then compared the time it took for the person to will the movement with the time of the readiness potential. Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely observing the electrical activity of the brain, Libet could predict what a person would do before the person was actually aware of having decided to do it.

This finding has caused philosophers of mind to ask: If the choice is determined in the brain before we decide to act, where is free will? Is our sense of willing our movements only an illusion, a rationalization after the fact for what has happened? Or is the choice made freely, but not consciously? If so, choice in action, as in perception, may reflect the importance of unconscious inference. Libet proposes that the process of initiating a voluntary action occurs in an unconscious part of the brain, but that just before the action is initiated, consciousness is recruited to approve or veto the action. In the 200 milliseconds before a finger is lifted, consciousness determines whether it moves or not.

Whatever the reasons for the delay between decision and awareness, Libet’s findings also raise the moral question: How can one be held responsible for decisions that are made without conscious awareness? The psychologists Richard Gregory and Vilayanur Ramachandran have drawn strict limits on that argument. They point out that “our conscious mind may not have free will, but it does have free won’t.” Michael Gazzaniga, one of the pioneers in the development of cognitive neuroscience and a member of the American Council of Bioethics, has added, “Brains are automatic, but people are free.” One cannot infer the sum total of neural activity simply by looking at a few neural circuits in the brain.

O
n the day of Yom Kippur, October 9, 2000, I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone at 5:15 in the morning. The phone is on Denise’s side of the bed, so she answered it and gave me a shove in the ribs.

“Eric, this call is from Stockholm. It must be for you. It’s not for me!”

On the telephone was Hans Jörnvall, the secretary general of the Nobel Foundation. I listened quietly as he told me that I had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for signal transduction in the nervous system and that I would share it with Arvid Carlsson and my longtime friend Paul Greengard. The conversation felt unreal.

The Stockholm deliberations must be among the best-kept secrets in the world. There are practically never any leaks. As a result, it is almost impossible to know who will get the prize in any given October. Yet very few people who receive the Nobel Prize are absolutely astonished by the very idea of winning it. Most people who are eligible sense that they are being considered because their colleagues speak of the possibility. Moreover, the Karolinska Institute runs periodic symposia designed to bring the world’s leading biologists to Stockholm, and I had just attended such a symposium a few weeks earlier. Nonetheless I had not expected this call. Many eminently prizeworthy candidates who are talked about as being eligible are never selected as laureates, and I thought it unlikely that I would be recognized.

In my state of disbelief, I didn’t know what to say except to acknowledge my gratitude. Jörnvall told me not to make any telephone calls until 6:00
A.M.
, when the press would be informed. After that, he said, I could make any calls I wanted.

Denise had begun to worry. I had been lying quietly with the phone to my ear for what seemed an unending period of time. She did not associate this uncommunicative state with me and feared that I was overwhelmed emotionally by the news. When I got off the phone and told her what I had just learned, she was doubly thrilled, pleased to learn that I had won the Nobel Prize and relieved that I was still alive and well. She then said, “Look, it’s so early. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

“Are you kidding?” I replied. “How can I possibly sleep?”

I waited out the half hour patiently and then proceeded to call everybody. I telephoned our children, Paul and Minouche, waking Minouche on the West Coast in the middle of the night. I then called Paul Greengard to congratulate him on our shared good fortune. I called my friends at Columbia, not only to share the news but also to prepare them for the press conference that was likely to be called for the afternoon. It became clear to me that even though this call came on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the most solemn Jewish holiday of the year, the press conference would go ahead.

Before I had gotten through my initial calls, the doorbell rang, and to my astonishment and delight, our neighbors in Riverdale, Tom Jessell, his wife, Jane Dodd, and their three daughters appeared on the doorstep with a bottle of wine in hand. Although it was too early to uncork the wine, they were most welcome visitors, a bit of reality in the dizzying wonderland of the Nobel. Denise proposed that we all sit down and have breakfast, which we did, despite the telephone’s ringing off the hook.

Everyone was calling—radio, television, newspapers, our friends. I found the telephone calls from Vienna most interesting because they were calling to tell me how pleased Austria was that there was yet another Austrian Nobel Prize. I had to remind them that this was an American Nobel Prize. I then received a telephone call from the Columbia press office asking me to participate in a press conference at the Alumni Auditorium at 1:30
P.M.

On the way to the press conference, I stopped off briefly at our synagogue—both to atone and to celebrate—and then went on to the lab, where I was received with jubilation. I was simply overwhelmed! I told everyone how grateful I was for their efforts and that I felt the Nobel was very much a shared prize.

The press conference was attended by many members of the faculty, who graciously gave me a standing ovation. Also present were the academic leaders of the university. David Hirsh, acting dean of the medical school, introduced me briefly to the press, and I made some comments expressing my gratitude to the university and to my family. I then explained very briefly the nature of my work. Over the next several days, more than a thousand e-mail messages, letters, and telephone calls poured in. I heard from people I had not seen in decades; girls I had dated in high school suddenly found me interesting again. Amid all the hustle and bustle, a commitment I had made earlier proved unexpectedly fortunate. I had agreed months before to give a lecture on October 17 in Italy in honor of Massimiliano Aloisi, a revered professor at the University of Padua. This seemed a wonderful opportunity for Denise and me to get away from the hurly-burly. Padua proved delightful, giving us the opportunity to visit the Scrovegni Chapel, which houses magnificent Giotto frescoes. I had also undertaken to combine the visit to Padua with a plenary lecture at the University of Turin, where I was to receive an honorary degree.

In Padua and then in Venice, which we visited briefly, we looked for gowns that Denise might wear to the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm. We finally struck gold in Turin, where Denise was referred to the dressmaker Adrianne Pastrone. Denise loved her designs and bought several gowns. I feel enormous gratitude toward Denise, in addition to my deep love for her, because of her support of me and my work in our life together. She has had a wonderful career in epidemiology at Columbia, but there is no question in my mind that she compromised her work and, even more, her leisure by taking up the slack created by my obsession with science.

On November 29, just before we were to leave for Stockholm, the Swedish ambassador to the United States invited the seven American laureates to Washington so that the recipients and their spouses could get to know one another. The visit featured a reception in the Oval Office hosted by President Clinton, who filled the room with his presence, discussed macroeconomics with the laureates in that field, and graciously posed Denise and me, and each of the other laureates and his partner, for pictures with him. Clinton was about to leave the presidency and spoke fondly of his job, emphasizing that he had become so good at positioning people for photo opportunities that he and the White House photographer might go into business together. The visit in the Oval Office was followed by dinner at the Swedish embassy, where Denise and I chatted with the laureates in other fields.

THE NOBEL PRIZE OWES ITS EXISTENCE TO THE REMARKABLE
vision of one person, Alfred Nobel. Born in Stockholm in 1833, he left Sweden when he was nine and returned only for very brief stays. He spoke Swedish, German, English, French, Russian, and Italian fluently but had no real homeland. A brilliant inventor, Nobel developed more than three hundred patents and maintained throughout his life a deep interest in science.

The invention that made his fortune was dynamite. In 1866 he discovered that liquid nitroglycerin, when absorbed by a kind of silicified earth called
kieselguhr
, was no longer unstable. In this form it could be shaped into sticks and used safely, since it now needed a detonator to explode. Dynamite sticks paved the way for the mining of minerals and for the unprecedented expansion of public works in the nineteenth century. Railways, canals (including the Suez Canal), harbors, roads, and bridges were constructed with relative ease, in large part because of dynamite’s power to move huge amounts of earth.

Nobel never married, and when he died on December 10, 1896, he left an estate of 31 million Swedish kronen, then equivalent to $9 million, a huge sum in its day. His will states: “The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall…constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Nobel then went on to list the five fields in which these prizes would be given: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and, for “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations,” the Nobel Peace Prize.

Despite its extraordinary clarity and vision, the will raised problems that were not settled for several years. To begin with, several parties were interested in acquiring the inheritance: Nobel’s relatives, some Swedish academies, the Swedish government, and, most important, the French government. The French claimed that France was Nobel’s legal residence. He rarely visited his native Sweden after he was nine years old, he never paid taxes there (paying taxes in a country usually serves as proof of citizenship), and he lived in France for almost thirty years. However, Nobel had never applied for French citizenship.

As a first step, Ragnar Sohlman, Nobel’s administrative assistant and executor (who later proved to be an effective, farsighted executive director of the Nobel Foundation), joined forces with the Swedish government to prove that Nobel was Swedish. They argued that since Nobel wrote his will in Swedish, appointed a Swede as executor, and designated various Swedish Academies to implement its provisions, he must legally be considered Swedish. In 1897 the Swedish government formally directed the country’s attorney general to maintain the will under Swedish jurisdiction.

This solved only one part of the problem: there remained the hesitations of the Swedish academies. They warned that they would have to find knowledgeable nominators, translators, consultants, and evaluators in order to award the prizes, yet Nobel’s will did not provide for these expenses. In the end, Sohlman encouraged the passage of a law giving each committee a part of the value of the prize for honoraria and expenses of its members and consultants. Compensation for members amounted to about one-third of a professor’s annual salary.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death. Sohlman had invested the holdings of Nobel’s estate wisely, and the endowment had already grown to 3.9 billion Swedish kronen, or slightly more than $1 billion. The award for each prize was 9 million Swedish kronen. The prizes in science and literature were awarded in a ceremony in Stockholm that has been repeated on that date every year since, except during World Wars I and II.

WHEN DENISE AND I ARRIVED AT THE CHECK-IN DESK OF
Scandinavian Airlines on December 2, we were given the red-carpet treatment. It continued when we arrived in Stockholm. We were met by Professor Jörnvall and assigned a driver and a limousine for our use during our stay. Irene Katzman, desk officer at the Swedish foreign service, served as an administrative coordinator for us. At the Grand Hotel, Stockholm’s premier hotel, we were given a beautiful suite overlooking the harbor. That first evening we had dinner with Irene, her husband, and their children. The next day, at our request, Irene arranged a private tour of the Jewish Museum, which described how the Jewish community of Sweden had helped save a significant portion of the Jewish community of Denmark during the Hitler period.

There followed a series of activities, each with its own power and charm. On December 7, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and I gave a press conference. That evening, we had dinner with the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, the people who had selected us. The committee members told us that they probably knew us as well as our spouses did because they had studied us in detail for more than a decade.

Denise and I were joined in Stockholm by our children—Minouche and her husband, Rick Sheinfield, and Paul and his wife, Emily—and by our older grandchildren, Paul and Emily’s daughters, Allison, then age eight, and Libby, age five. (Minouche was pregnant with Maya when she joined us in Stockholm; her son, Izzy, who was then two, stayed with Rick’s parents.)

Denise and I had also invited our senior colleagues from Columbia—Jimmy and Cathy Schwartz, Steve Siegelbaum and Amy Bedik, Richard Axel, Tom Jessell and Jane Dodd, and John Koester and Kathy Hilten. All of them were longtime friends to whom I owed a great deal. Bridging the two groups were Ruth and Gerry Fischbach. Ruth is Denise’s second cousin and director of the Center for Bioethics at Columbia. Gerry is an outstanding neural scientist and a leader of the scientific community in the United States. Shortly before our trip to Stockholm, he was offered the post of dean of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and vice president for health sciences at Columbia University. By the time he arrived, he had accepted the offer and was my new boss.

29–1
My family in Stockholm. Standing, from left: Alex and Annie Bystryn (my nephew and niece), Jean-Claude Bystryn (their father, Denise’s brother), Ruth and Gerry Fischbach (Ruth is Denise’s cousin), Marcia Bystryn (Jean-Claude’s wife). Sitting, from left: Libby, Emily, and Paul Kandel, Denise, me, Minouche and her husband, Rick, Allison. (From Eric Kandel’s personal collection.)