// features //
December 2015
The Life of a Laureate:
Professor Eric Kandel on Klimt, Sea Slugs, and Everything in Between
Netana Markovitz
Dr. Eric Kandel walks into his office six minutes before 10:30 A.M., our scheduled meeting time. His red polka-dotted bow tie pops against his all-gray ensemble and matching tufts of hair. This scientist has style.
“Sorry I’m late. Just give me a minute to settle in.” At 86 years old (though you wouldn’t know it), he saunters out of his secretary’s office and, in his slight Brooklyn accent, says, “Come on in. Would you like some tea or coffee?” I’m immediately at ease.
His office is covered from floor to ceiling in photos and artwork. Most noticeably, a huge poster of his latest book, The Age of Insight, is propped up against the wall. The book discusses one of his more recent interests: the intersection of neuroscience and art. In fact, in a few weeks, he’ll be traveling to his birthplace of Vienna to give a lecture on “The Women of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka,” an exhibition at the famous Belvedere museum.
Dr. Kandel is interrupted by a phone call from his wife of over 50 years, Denise, an epidemiologist. She is calling about a collaboration they began five years ago, in which they are studying addiction patterns based on the order of addiction to nicotine and cocaine. He tells me that they’ll both be giving speeches next week at the Nobel Symposium in Minneapolis.
“[Denise] realized she needed to develop an animal model and she realized the guy she was sleeping with works on these things, so she talked him into doing it.” He is already laughing before he has finished the sentence.
This sense of humor is characteristic of Kandel, who is as invested in laughter as he is in neuroscience. He even infused humor into his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In his slide-show presentation, he featured a picture of the organism that he studied, the Aplysia (a type of seaslug), decked out in a Nobel Prize medal. He is so excited to show me the audience’s laughter that he beckons me over to his computer to watch a video of the speech.
“I’ll show it to you the way I showed it to them,” he says. “What I’ve said so far didn’t require any slides in my talk.
“But then I say, I selected Aplysia. As you can tell at a glance, this is a very beautiful animal. Moreover, it’s highly intelligent. But what is most amazing is that it’s extremely accomplished, and many of my friends, including several in this room, think the snail, rather than the investigator, should have won the Nobel Prize.”
Sitting beside Kandel as we watch him on the screen, I feel as though I am behind the scenes of the movie set that is Kandel’s brain, narrated by the director, screenwriter, and star. We watch the video for nearly twenty minutes and I still have a page left of questions, but Kandel’s warm and relaxed aura gives me the impression that he would be happy to talk to me all day.
We’ll later return to the computer, which rests on the second edition of his textbook, Principles of Neural Science, to watch a video of him and his wife spontaneously erupting into swing dance as he enters the unveiling ceremony of an elementary school in Germany that was recently named for him.
The Europe that Kandel returned to for the school opening was very different from Hitler’s Europe that he had fled over 70 years ago. In March 1938, when Kandel was just eight years old, Hitler took over Vienna, changing Kandel’s life forever.
“Hitler marched into Vienna, and the next day, none of my classmates would speak to me. In the park I was roughed up. The Jewish children at my school were kicked out and transferred to another school only for Jews, and after Kristallnacht, which was on November 9, 1938, we were kicked out of our own apartment.”
Kandel theorizes that his fascination—or even obsession—with human behavior and memory stems from his experiences during the Holocaust.
“Trying to understand what happened in Vienna was really a dominating theme in my life: How could people—cultured, civilized people—who enjoy Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, listen to Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?”
After his mother completed the long, arduous process of procuring affidavits for the family, they were able to escape from Europe. Kandel and his brother, joined later by their parents, first fled to the home of their wealthy relatives in Brussels and then to Antwerp, before finally arriving at Ellis Island. The family settled in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he briefly attended P.S. 217. Two weeks after starting public school, he had a traumatic episode, recalling his nightmarish elementary school experience in Vienna, and subsequently switched to Yeshiva of Flatbush, an Orthodox Jewish private school. Although his fears of anti-Semitism subsided once he switched schools, a look of disgust washes over his face as he recalls his bitter elementary school experience, mostly due to an awful teacher. He went on to attend Erasmus High School, a public school, where he excelled in academics and athletics. At the encouragement of a teacher, he then applied to Harvard College and was ultimately accepted and granted a generous scholarship.
To this day, Kandel remains deeply affected by his complicated relationship to Vienna. When he learned that the University of Vienna sat on a road named after Karl Lueger, an antiSemitic Austrian politician who had a profound influence on Adolf Hitler during his formative years, Kandel was so appalled that he contacted the University. In 2012, they changed the name of the road to University-Ring. As he describes it to me, I can tell how proud he is of this accomplishment—seemingly as proud as he was to show me his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He searches for a long time on the internet, typing with his two pointer fingers, in order to find a picture of the street sign.
“I’m trying to help the Jewish community of Vienna in a modest way,” Kandel says.
The start of his changed relationship with Vienna actually began with his Nobel Prize, when Austria claimed his Nobel as another one of their own.
“All the Austrian newspapers called me and said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful, another Austrian Nobel Prize?’ And I said, ‘You’ve got this wrong. This is an American Nobel Prize and a Jewish Nobel Prize.’”
Disconcerted by Kandel’s response, the then-president of Austria, Thomas Klestil, emailed him in an attempt to make amends, asking how they could honor him.
“I said, ‘I’ve got more honors than I deserve, but it’d be nice to have a symposium [at] the University of Vienna on the response of Austria to National Socialism [Nazism].’”
What emerged was a symposium at the University of Vienna dedicated to the response of Austria to Nazism in comparison to the responses of other countries. A book based on the papers presented at the conference was published in 2004. Although by this time the Austrian president had already passed away, Kandel points to this gesture as the defining moment in the start of the repair of his relationship with his birthplace.
Kandel’s relationship with Vienna is by no means completely mended. He remains disgusted, for example, by a bronze sculpture in the center of Vienna (called the Monument Against War and Fascism) that portrays a Jewish man scrubbing the pavement during Hitler’s annexation of Austria–a humiliating job Kandel’s own father was forced to do. Hitler mandated this street scrubbing in order to erase messages supporting Schuschnigg, the Chancellor of Austria, who pushed for Austria to remain independent.
“There’s that man on the floor, that horrible looking thing, I find that offensive; that’s one of the things I want to work on next. It’s awful, it’s really humiliating,” Kandel tells me. Kandel speaks matter-of-factly and unemotionally, but I can still tell how much this bothers him on a personal level.
Kandel’s experience during the Holocaust motivated him to write his senior thesis at Harvard about the attitudes of three German writers towards Nazism, and he planned on pursuing a higher degree in intellectual history. However, his friend’s father, who happened to be “big in the Freud circle,” convinced him to leave the study of history and to instead pursue psychoanalysis. After completing the one required pre-medical course, introductory chemistry, he matriculated at New York University School of Medicine, the traditional path at the time for the study of psychoanalysis. During medical school, Kandel determined that in order to be a good psychoanalyst, he needed to understand the brain. As the study of neuroscience was rare at this time, he had to go uptown to Columbia to take a six-month elective on the subject, during which time he first stepped foot into the laboratory of Dr. Harvey Grundfest. A professor of neurology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Grundfest soon became one of Kandel’s earliest mentors. It was in Grundfest’s laboratory where he fell in love with scientific research.
“I’d never had an experience like this. It was so different, where you planned experiments, worked with your hands—the sensual pleasure of working with your hands, and I could just see, I could do this for the rest of my life.”
Although he loved scientific research, his decision to turn it into a career was not without anxiety. He worried about supporting a family on the meager salary of a scientist. After articulating these anxieties to Denise, whom he was just beginning to date, she expressed no hesitations.
“She said ‘absurd—money’s of no significance whatsoever.’ She’s never repeated those words,” Kandel says with a laugh.
Turns out, Denise was right. Over sixty years later, Kandel has penned countless articles and books, including the college neuroscience textbook; is the founding director of the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University; and to top it all off, has received the highest scientific honor of all: the Nobel Prize.
These days, Kandel keeps busy. When he is not running his still-groundbreaking laboratory, he plays tennis, swims, and goes to museums. His eyes light up as he tells me how much he loved the Picasso sculpture exhibit at the MoMA. Tonight, he and Denise will go see “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera, one of his favorites. Kandel, a twenty-first century Renaissance man if there ever was one, has a sage piece of advice for us all: take the Nobel.
“It’s marvelous. As I tell my friends, don’t turn it down.”
“Sorry I’m late. Just give me a minute to settle in.” At 86 years old (though you wouldn’t know it), he saunters out of his secretary’s office and, in his slight Brooklyn accent, says, “Come on in. Would you like some tea or coffee?” I’m immediately at ease.
His office is covered from floor to ceiling in photos and artwork. Most noticeably, a huge poster of his latest book, The Age of Insight, is propped up against the wall. The book discusses one of his more recent interests: the intersection of neuroscience and art. In fact, in a few weeks, he’ll be traveling to his birthplace of Vienna to give a lecture on “The Women of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka,” an exhibition at the famous Belvedere museum.
Dr. Kandel is interrupted by a phone call from his wife of over 50 years, Denise, an epidemiologist. She is calling about a collaboration they began five years ago, in which they are studying addiction patterns based on the order of addiction to nicotine and cocaine. He tells me that they’ll both be giving speeches next week at the Nobel Symposium in Minneapolis.
“[Denise] realized she needed to develop an animal model and she realized the guy she was sleeping with works on these things, so she talked him into doing it.” He is already laughing before he has finished the sentence.
This sense of humor is characteristic of Kandel, who is as invested in laughter as he is in neuroscience. He even infused humor into his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In his slide-show presentation, he featured a picture of the organism that he studied, the Aplysia (a type of seaslug), decked out in a Nobel Prize medal. He is so excited to show me the audience’s laughter that he beckons me over to his computer to watch a video of the speech.
“I’ll show it to you the way I showed it to them,” he says. “What I’ve said so far didn’t require any slides in my talk.
“But then I say, I selected Aplysia. As you can tell at a glance, this is a very beautiful animal. Moreover, it’s highly intelligent. But what is most amazing is that it’s extremely accomplished, and many of my friends, including several in this room, think the snail, rather than the investigator, should have won the Nobel Prize.”
Sitting beside Kandel as we watch him on the screen, I feel as though I am behind the scenes of the movie set that is Kandel’s brain, narrated by the director, screenwriter, and star. We watch the video for nearly twenty minutes and I still have a page left of questions, but Kandel’s warm and relaxed aura gives me the impression that he would be happy to talk to me all day.
We’ll later return to the computer, which rests on the second edition of his textbook, Principles of Neural Science, to watch a video of him and his wife spontaneously erupting into swing dance as he enters the unveiling ceremony of an elementary school in Germany that was recently named for him.
The Europe that Kandel returned to for the school opening was very different from Hitler’s Europe that he had fled over 70 years ago. In March 1938, when Kandel was just eight years old, Hitler took over Vienna, changing Kandel’s life forever.
“Hitler marched into Vienna, and the next day, none of my classmates would speak to me. In the park I was roughed up. The Jewish children at my school were kicked out and transferred to another school only for Jews, and after Kristallnacht, which was on November 9, 1938, we were kicked out of our own apartment.”
Kandel theorizes that his fascination—or even obsession—with human behavior and memory stems from his experiences during the Holocaust.
“Trying to understand what happened in Vienna was really a dominating theme in my life: How could people—cultured, civilized people—who enjoy Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, listen to Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?”
After his mother completed the long, arduous process of procuring affidavits for the family, they were able to escape from Europe. Kandel and his brother, joined later by their parents, first fled to the home of their wealthy relatives in Brussels and then to Antwerp, before finally arriving at Ellis Island. The family settled in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he briefly attended P.S. 217. Two weeks after starting public school, he had a traumatic episode, recalling his nightmarish elementary school experience in Vienna, and subsequently switched to Yeshiva of Flatbush, an Orthodox Jewish private school. Although his fears of anti-Semitism subsided once he switched schools, a look of disgust washes over his face as he recalls his bitter elementary school experience, mostly due to an awful teacher. He went on to attend Erasmus High School, a public school, where he excelled in academics and athletics. At the encouragement of a teacher, he then applied to Harvard College and was ultimately accepted and granted a generous scholarship.
To this day, Kandel remains deeply affected by his complicated relationship to Vienna. When he learned that the University of Vienna sat on a road named after Karl Lueger, an antiSemitic Austrian politician who had a profound influence on Adolf Hitler during his formative years, Kandel was so appalled that he contacted the University. In 2012, they changed the name of the road to University-Ring. As he describes it to me, I can tell how proud he is of this accomplishment—seemingly as proud as he was to show me his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He searches for a long time on the internet, typing with his two pointer fingers, in order to find a picture of the street sign.
“I’m trying to help the Jewish community of Vienna in a modest way,” Kandel says.
The start of his changed relationship with Vienna actually began with his Nobel Prize, when Austria claimed his Nobel as another one of their own.
“All the Austrian newspapers called me and said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful, another Austrian Nobel Prize?’ And I said, ‘You’ve got this wrong. This is an American Nobel Prize and a Jewish Nobel Prize.’”
Disconcerted by Kandel’s response, the then-president of Austria, Thomas Klestil, emailed him in an attempt to make amends, asking how they could honor him.
“I said, ‘I’ve got more honors than I deserve, but it’d be nice to have a symposium [at] the University of Vienna on the response of Austria to National Socialism [Nazism].’”
What emerged was a symposium at the University of Vienna dedicated to the response of Austria to Nazism in comparison to the responses of other countries. A book based on the papers presented at the conference was published in 2004. Although by this time the Austrian president had already passed away, Kandel points to this gesture as the defining moment in the start of the repair of his relationship with his birthplace.
Kandel’s relationship with Vienna is by no means completely mended. He remains disgusted, for example, by a bronze sculpture in the center of Vienna (called the Monument Against War and Fascism) that portrays a Jewish man scrubbing the pavement during Hitler’s annexation of Austria–a humiliating job Kandel’s own father was forced to do. Hitler mandated this street scrubbing in order to erase messages supporting Schuschnigg, the Chancellor of Austria, who pushed for Austria to remain independent.
“There’s that man on the floor, that horrible looking thing, I find that offensive; that’s one of the things I want to work on next. It’s awful, it’s really humiliating,” Kandel tells me. Kandel speaks matter-of-factly and unemotionally, but I can still tell how much this bothers him on a personal level.
Kandel’s experience during the Holocaust motivated him to write his senior thesis at Harvard about the attitudes of three German writers towards Nazism, and he planned on pursuing a higher degree in intellectual history. However, his friend’s father, who happened to be “big in the Freud circle,” convinced him to leave the study of history and to instead pursue psychoanalysis. After completing the one required pre-medical course, introductory chemistry, he matriculated at New York University School of Medicine, the traditional path at the time for the study of psychoanalysis. During medical school, Kandel determined that in order to be a good psychoanalyst, he needed to understand the brain. As the study of neuroscience was rare at this time, he had to go uptown to Columbia to take a six-month elective on the subject, during which time he first stepped foot into the laboratory of Dr. Harvey Grundfest. A professor of neurology at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Grundfest soon became one of Kandel’s earliest mentors. It was in Grundfest’s laboratory where he fell in love with scientific research.
“I’d never had an experience like this. It was so different, where you planned experiments, worked with your hands—the sensual pleasure of working with your hands, and I could just see, I could do this for the rest of my life.”
Although he loved scientific research, his decision to turn it into a career was not without anxiety. He worried about supporting a family on the meager salary of a scientist. After articulating these anxieties to Denise, whom he was just beginning to date, she expressed no hesitations.
“She said ‘absurd—money’s of no significance whatsoever.’ She’s never repeated those words,” Kandel says with a laugh.
Turns out, Denise was right. Over sixty years later, Kandel has penned countless articles and books, including the college neuroscience textbook; is the founding director of the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University; and to top it all off, has received the highest scientific honor of all: the Nobel Prize.
These days, Kandel keeps busy. When he is not running his still-groundbreaking laboratory, he plays tennis, swims, and goes to museums. His eyes light up as he tells me how much he loved the Picasso sculpture exhibit at the MoMA. Tonight, he and Denise will go see “Otello” at the Metropolitan Opera, one of his favorites. Kandel, a twenty-first century Renaissance man if there ever was one, has a sage piece of advice for us all: take the Nobel.
“It’s marvelous. As I tell my friends, don’t turn it down.”
// NETANA MARKOVITZ is a Junior in Columbia College. She can be reached at nhm2110@columbia.edu. Photo courtesy of www.nobelprize.org.