In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (47 page)
Read In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind Online
Authors: Eric R. Kandel
Tags: #Psychology, #Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, #Cognitive Psychology
This was too good an occasion to pass up. On the one free evening of our stay in Stockholm, Denise and I threw a dinner party in a beautiful private dining room of the Grand Hotel for all the guests and relatives we had invited to Stockholm. We wanted to thank everyone for coming and for celebrating this great occasion with us. Beyond that, we wanted to celebrate Gerry’s becoming dean and vice president at Columbia. It was a joyous evening (figure 29–1).
ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER
8,
ARVID, PAUL, AND I GAVE
our Nobel lectures in the Karolinska Institute before the faculty and students of the institute and our guests and friends. I spoke about my work, and as I introduced
Aplysia
, I could not help but comment that this was not only a very beautiful animal but a very accomplished one. I then flashed on the screen a wonderful image that Jack Byrne, one of my first graduate students, had sent me showing a proud
Aplysia
with a Nobel Prize medal draped around its neck (figure 29–2). The audience broke out in laughter.
Each year on the Saturday closest to the award dinner, the Jewish community of Stockholm, about seven thousand strong, invites the Jewish Nobel laureates to the Great Synagogue of Stockholm to personally receive the rabbi’s blessing and a token gift. On December 9, I took a sizable entourage of colleagues and family with me to the synagogue. At the service I was asked to make a brief comment and was given a beautiful, small glass replica of the synagogue; Denise was given a red rose by a woman in the congregation who had also been in hiding in France during the war.
The next day, December 10, we received the Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf. The ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall was the most remarkable and memorable event of all. Every detail is honed to perfection from a century of experience. To commemorate Alfred Nobel’s death, the Concert Hall was decorated with flowers flown in from San Remo, Italy, where Nobel spent the last years of his life. Everyone was dressed formally, the men in white tie and tails, and a marvelously festive mood was in the air. The Stockholm Philharmonic, seated on a balcony behind the stage, played at various times during the ceremony.
29–2
Aplysia
with a Nobel Prize.
(Courtesy of Jack Byrne.)
The ceremony began at 4:00
P.M
. Once the laureates and the Nobel assembly were onstage, the king appeared, together with Queen Silvia, their three children, and the king’s aunt, Princess Lilian. With the royal family in place, the standing audience of two thousand dignitaries joined in singing the royal anthem. Presiding over it all was a large painting of Alfred Nobel.
The investiture began with comments in Swedish by Bengt Samuelsson, chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation. They were followed by representatives of the five awards committees, who described the discoveries and achievements being recognized. Our award in Physiology or Medicine was introduced by Urban Ungerstadt, a senior neurophysiologist and member of the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute. After outlining in Swedish our respective contributions, he turned and addressed us in English:
Dear Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric Kandel. Your discoveries concerning “signal transduction in the nervous system” have truly changed our understanding of brain function.
From Arvid Carlsson’s research we now know that Parkinson’s disease is due to failure in synaptic release of dopamine. We know that we can substitute the lost function by a simple molecule, L-DOPA, which replenishes the emptied stores of dopamine and, in this way, give millions of humans a better life.
We know from Paul Greengard’s work how this is brought about. How second messengers activate protein kinases leading to changes in cellular reactions. We begin to see how phosphorylation plays a central part in the very orchestration of the different transmitter inputs to the nerve cells.
Finally, Eric Kandel’s work has shown us how these transmitters, through second transmitters and protein phosphorylation, create short- and long-term memory, forming the very basis for our ability to exist and interact meaningfully in our world.
On behalf of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute, I wish to convey our warmest congratulations, and I ask you to step forward to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King.
One by one, Arvid, Paul, and I rose and came forward. Each of us shook hands with the king and received from him a decorated and bound certificate and a leather box containing the gold medal. On one side of the medal is an image of Alfred Nobel (figure 29–3), while on the other are two women, one representing the genius of medicine and the other a sick girl. The genius of medicine, holding an open book in her lap, is collecting water that is pouring out of a rock in order to quench the thirst of the sick girl. To blaring trumpets, I bowed three times, as prescribed: once to the king, once to the Nobel Assembly, and finally to Denise, Paul, Emily, Minouche, Rick, and the rest of the distinguished audience. When I sat down, the Stockholm Philharmonic played the third movement of Mozart’s unsurpassed clarinet concerto. On this occasion the melodic solos, written for a Viennese temperament like mine, sounded even lovelier than usual.
29–3
My granddaughters Libby and Allison on the stage with me after the adjournment of the Nobel Prize ceremony. We are holding the Nobel Medal. (From Eric Kandel’s personal collection.)
From the awards ceremony we went directly to a banquet in the City Hall. Completed in 1923, this magnificent building was designed by the great Swedish architect Ragnar Ostberg on the lines of a northern Italian piazza. A table set for eighty in the center of the large hall accommodated the laureates, the royal family, the prime minister, and various other dignitaries. Guests of the laureates, members of the award-granting institutions, representatives of the major universities, and high-level representatives from the government and from industry were seated at twenty-six tables surrounding the center table. A few students from each Swedish university and some of the colleges were seated around the walls.
After dinner, each laureate or a representative from each group of laureates went to the podium to say a few words. I spoke for our group:
Engraved above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was the maxim, Know thyself. Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages—from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman—have thought it wise to understand oneself and one’s behavior….
Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and I, whom you honor here tonight, and our generation of scientists, have attempted to translate abstract philosophical questions about mind into the empirical language of biology. The key principle that guides our work is that the mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, an astonishingly complex computational device that constructs our perception of the external world, fixes our attention, and controls our actions.
We three have taken the first steps in linking mind to molecules by determining how the biochemistry of signaling within and between nerve cells is related to mental processes and to mental disorders. We have found that the neural networks of the brain are not fixed, but that communication between nerve cells can be regulated by neurotransmitter molecules discovered here in Sweden by your great school of molecular pharmacology.
In looking toward the future, our generation of scientists has come to believe that the biology of the mind will be as scientifically important to this century as the biology of the gene has been to the twentieth century. In a larger sense, the biological study of mind is more than a scientific inquiry of great promise; it is also an important humanistic endeavor. The biology of mind bridges the sciences—concerned with the natural world—and the humanities—concerned with the meaning of human experience. Insights that come from this new synthesis will not only improve our understanding of psychiatric and neurological disorders, but will also lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Indeed, even in our generation, we already have gained initial biological insights toward a deeper understanding of the self. We know that even though the words of the maxim are no longer encoded in stone at Delphi, they are encoded in our brains. For centuries the maxim has been preserved in human memory by those very molecular processes in the brain that you graciously recognize today, and that we are just beginning to understand.
The banquet was followed by dancing. Denise and I had taken lessons to brush up on our limited and rarely practiced waltzing skills, but sadly, and to Denise’s unending disappointment, we didn’t get much of a chance to dance. As soon as dinner was over, we were approached by our friends, and I so enjoyed chatting with them that I found it hard to break away.
On December 11 we were invited to dinner at the Royal Palace by the king and queen. The morning of December 13, Santa Lucia’s Day and the first day of Sweden’s month-long celebration of Christmas, Paul, Arvid, and I were awakened by young college students—mostly women—carrying candles and singing carols in our honor. We then left the capital to give a series of lectures at the University of Uppsala. We returned to a brash and highly entertaining Santa Lucia dinner organized by the medical students in Stockholm. The next day, we left for New York.
Four years later, on October 4, 2004, Denise and I were on a Lufthansa flight from Vienna to New York when the stewardess gave me a message saying that my colleague and friend Richard Axel and Linda Buck, his former postdoctoral student, had received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking studies on the sense of smell carried out at Columbia. In December 2004 we all went back to Stockholm to celebrate Richard and Linda. Life is a circle, indeed!
A FEW WEEKS AFTER I FIRST HEARD FROM STOCKHOLM THAT I
had received the Nobel Prize, the president of Austria, Thomas Klestil, wrote to congratulate me. He expressed a desire to honor me as a Nobel laureate of Viennese origins. I took the opportunity to suggest that we organize a symposium entitled “Austria’s Response to National Socialism: Implications for Scientific and Humanistic Scholarship.” My purpose was to compare Austria’s response to the Hitler period, which was one of denial of any wrongdoing, with Germany’s response, which was to try to deal honestly with the past.
President Klestil agreed enthusiastically and sent me copies of several speeches he had delivered about the awkward situation of present-day Jews in Vienna. He then put me in touch with Elisabeth Gehrer, the minister of education, to help me organize the symposium. I told her that I hoped the symposium would serve three functions: first, to help acknowledge Austria’s role in the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews during World War II; second, to try to come to grips with Austria’s implicit denial of its role during the Nazi period; and third, to evaluate the significance for scholarship of the disappearance of the Jewish community of Vienna.
Austria’s record on these first two issues is quite clear. For a decade before Austria joined with Germany, a significant fraction of the Austrian population belonged to the Nazi party. Following annexation, Austrians made up about 8 percent of the population of the greater German Reich, yet they accounted for more than 30 percent of the officials working to eliminate the Jews. Austrians commanded four Polish death camps and held other leadership positions in the Reich: in addition to Hitler, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was head of the Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the extermination program, were Austrians. It is estimated that of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust, approximately half were killed by Austrian functionaries led by Eichmann.