Eric Kandel Nobel Prize, Bio, Wiki, Age, Wife, Books, And Net Worth

Eric Kandel Bio | Wiki

Eric Kandel ( Full name: Erich Richard Kandel) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor. He specializes in psychiatry, a neuroscientist. Eric is  a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians. Also, he is a Surgeon at Columbia University.  His research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons won him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Eric shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. Currently, he serves as the Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Eric is the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, the current Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University.  In addition, Eric serves on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Eric Kandel Age

He was born on November 7, 1929, in Vienna, Austria.  Eric is 92 years old.

Eric Kandel Height

He is a man of average stature. Eric stands at the height of 5 ft 7 in ( Approx 1.7 m).

Eric Kandel's photo
Kandel’s photo

Eric Kandel Family

He was born and raised by his parents in Vienna, Austria. His mother Charlotte Zimels was born in 1897 in Kolomyya, Pokuttya (modern Ukraine) and his father Hermann Kandel, was born in 1898 in Olesko, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary). Charlotte originated from an Ashkenazi Jewish family.  By then, Kolomyya was part of Austria-Hungary. Charlotte and Hermann moved to Vienna, Austria at the beginning of World War I, where they met and married in 1923.

Shortly after Eric was born,  his father established a toy store. However,  they left Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938 although they were thoroughly assimilated and acculturated. Attacks on Jews had escalated and Jewish property was being confiscated a result of Aryanization (Arisierung). At the age of 9,  Eric and his brother Ludwig who was by then 14, boarded the Gerolstein at Antwerp, Belgium. The two brothers joined their uncle in Brooklyn on May 11, 1939,  and their parents followed later on.

Eric Kandel Wife

He is married to Denise Kandel, an 89-year-old American medical sociologist and epidemiologist who was born on February 27, 1933 in Paris, France. Denise serves as a Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Psychiatry at Columbia University. She is also the Head of the Department of Epidemiology of Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The couple wedded in 1956 and have two children.

Eric Kandel Education

They arrived in the United States and settled in Brooklyn,  Eric was then tutored by his grandfather in Judaic studies. He was later accepted at the Yeshiva of Flatbush and graduated in  1944. He then enrolled at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School in the New York City school system. At Harvard, he majored in History and Literature. Eric wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on “The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger”.

Eric Kandel Nobel Prize | 2000

In 2000, he was awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. Eric shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. His victory was due to his work with Aplysia on the biological mechanisms of memory storage. After Eric won the prize, it was said in Vienna that Eric was an “Austrian” Nobel. Eric found this statement”typically Viennese: very opportunistic, very disingenuous, somewhat hypocritical”.

Eric Kandel Contribution To Psychology

His undergraduate major at Harvard was History and Literature. Eric wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on “The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger”. At Harvard, psychology was dominated by the work of B. F. Skinner. While there, Eric became interested in learning and memory.  However, Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology from biological considerations such as neurology, as its own level of discourse.

Eric’s work is essentially centered on an explanation of the relationships between neurology and psychology. The world of neuroscience was opened up to him when he met Anna Kris, the daughter of psychoanalysts, Ernst Kris and Marianne Rie. A pioneer in revealing the importance of unconscious neural processes called Sigmund Freud was at the root of  Eric’s interest in the biology of motivation as well as unconscious and conscious memory.

Eric Kandel Aplysia

After he completed his residency in psychiatry in 1962, Eric went to Paris to learn about the marine mollusk Aplysia californica from Ladislav Tauc. He had realized that simple forms of learning like habituation, classical conditioning, sensitization, and operant conditioning could readily be studied with ganglia isolated from Aplysia.

Eric started working in the Department of Physiology and Psychiatry at the New York University Medical School. He eventually formed the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior. He worked with Irving Kupferman and Harold Pinsker and developed protocols for demonstrating simple forms of learning by intact Aplysia. Laboratory members including Terry Walters, Robert Hawkins, and Tom Abrams, were able to extend the Aplysia system into the study of classical conditioning by 1981.

Eric Kandel In Search Of Memory | Memory

Currently, Eric serves on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind is his popularized account chronicling his life and research. The book won the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. The book was published in 2007 New York: W. W. Norton & Company. It was adopted in to a film by Petra Seger in 2008.

Eric Kandel Columbia

He has been actively contributing to science as a member of the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University since 1974. In 2008, Eric and Daniela Pollak discovered that if mice are conditioned to associate a specific noise with protection from harm produces a behavioral antidepressant effect comparable to that of medications. This behavior is called “learned safety.”

The finding was reported in Neuron, further studies informed the cellular interactions between antidepressants and behavioral treatments. Eric is well known for the textbooks he has helped write including Principles of Neural Science. The book was first published in 1981 and now in its fifth edition, it has often been used as a teaching and reference text in medical schools and undergraduate and graduate programs. Also, Eric has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1974. He has worked at Columbia University since 1974 and resides in New York City.

Eric Kandel Books | Publications

– 1976 Cellular Basis of Behaviour: An Introduction to Behavioural Neurobiology, New York: W.H. Freeman & Company
– 1978 A Cell – Biological Approach to Learning, New York: Society for Neuroscience.
– 1979 Behavioural Bio of Aplysia: Origin & Evolution, New York: W.H. Freeman & Company
– 2012 [1981], Principles of Neural Science (5th ed.), New York: McGraw-Hill
– 1987 Molecular Neurobiology in Neurology and Psychiatry, New York: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
– 1995 Essentials of Neural Science and Behaviour, New York: McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange
– 2005 Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind, New York: American Psychiatric Publishing
– 2007 In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, New York: W. W. Norton & Company
– 2012 The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, New York: Random House
– 2016 Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, New York: Columbia University Press
– 2018 The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Eric Kandel Quotes

– Truth has many dimensions, and the way you arrive at truth in complex situations is through many perspectives.
– Life is sort of a circle. You come back to a lot of the interests that you had early in life.
– As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.
– It is this potential for plasticity of the relatively stereotyped units of the nervous system that endows each of us with our individuality.
– I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.
– One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life.
– Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

Eric Kandel Net Worth

He is an Austrian-born American medical doctor with an estimated net worth of $16 million.

How Old Is Eric Kandel

He is a 92-year-old Neurologist who was born on November 7, 1929, in Vienna, Austria.

Is Eric Kandel Married

He is married to Denise Kandel, an 89-year-old American medical sociologist and epidemiologist who was born on February 27, 1933 in Paris, France. The couple wedded in 1956 and have two children.

What Did Eric Kandel Discover

In 2008, Eric and Daniela Pollak discovered that if mice are conditioned to associate a specific noise with protection from harm produces a behavioral antidepressant effect comparable to that of medications. This behavior is called “learned safety.”

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