Eric Kandel: From Refugee to Nobel Prize Winner

doing science is a very satisfying way to spend one's career pick a problem that is really important and try to tackle it in a very very serious way don't do a trivial problem it's better to make small progress on something really really important than to push a trivial issue further away mine scientific questions often come from things that I have personal interest in I went to Harvard and majored in history literature because well I wanted to understand what happened to me in Vienna 1938 when Hitler marched in I wanted to see how you know civilized people could become so brutal and anti-semitic while I was writing my dissertation I met a famous psychoanalyst and he said to me if you want to understand motivation if you understand what happened to you you're not going to do it through history or literature you know you've got to really study the mind you've kind of study why people do things you've got to study psychoanalysis I had no science background whatsoever I took physics I took organic chemistry took the courses necessary for medical school and went to medical school with the idea of becoming a psychoanalyst I came along in a very good time when neuroscience and psychology which were worlds apart was beginning to come together I was one of many people that contribute to that there were people before me that already started the way but I took advantage of the fact that this was a new direction that was opening up there were certain experimental systems that would be conducive to them and many neuroscientists by generation was scared to work a behavior because they thought it was too complicated and I being a psychiatrist it didn't bother me in the slightest as I learned how to study behavior worked at a simple repetitive study and see what happens when animal learned something and I found that what happens is with the strength of synaptic connections changes a nerve cells communicate with each other at specific sites called synapses and these synapses are changed by learning and certain kinds of learning in the synapses get stronger other kinds of learning a big and weaker well I think working out the first cellular mechanisms of learning a memory is not so bad I'm quite proud of the fact that I did this way beyond that now the field is very small when I came into it is that gigantic mean many people were bring different aspects of behavior and making burger parties I mean the brain is unbelievably complicated we've got decades and decades of work ahead of us but very good partners [Music] you

Channel: Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Views: 12,459

Keywords: science, medicine, nobel prize, neuroscience, refugee

Id: Em_z70HYCck

Length: 2min 59sec (179 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018