Erik_Kandel_-_V_poiskakh_pamyati_angl

useful preparation for science before I began with Grundfest and Purpura; I knew very little biochemistry when I joined forces with Jimmy Schwartz; and I knew nothing about molecular genetics when Richard Axel and I began to collaborate. In each case, trying new things proved anxiety-provoking but also exhilarating. It is better to lose some years trying something new and fundamental than to carry out routine experiments that everyone else is doing and that others could do as well as (if not better than) you.

Most of all, I think it is important to define a problem or a set of interrelated problems that has a long trajectory. I was fortunate at the very beginning to stumble onto an interesting problem in my work on the hippocampus and memory and then to switch decisively to the study of learning in a simple animal. Both have an intellectual sweep and scope that have carried me through many experimental failures and disappointments.

As a result, I have not experienced the malaise that some of my colleagues have described when, in midlife, they become bored with the science they are doing and turn to other things. I have engaged in a vari-

ety of non-research-based academic activities, such as writing textbooks, serving on academic committees at Columbia and nationally, and helping to found a biotechnology company. But I never did any of those things because I was bored with doing science. Richard Axel talks about the reinforcing value of data—the playing in one's head with new and interesting findings—as addictive. Unless Richard sees new data coming along, he becomes despondent, a feeling many of us share.

MY WORK IN SCIENCE HAS ALSO BEEN GREATLY ENRICHED BY THE

passion that Denise and I share for music and art. When we moved to New York from Boston in December 1964, we bought a hundred-year-old house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx with wonderful views of the Hudson River and the Palisades. Over the decades we have filled that house with etchings, drawings, and paintings—decorative art from the beginning of the twentieth century—a form with strong roots in Vienna as well as in France. We collect French art nouveau furniture, vases, and lamps by Louis Majorelle, Emile Galé, and the brothers Daum, an interest that originated with Denise. Her mother got us started in this direction by giving us for a wedding present a beautiful tea table that Gallé had made for his first exhibit.

Once in New York, we began to focus our interest in graphic art on Austrian and German expressionists—Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele among the Austrians, and Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, and Ernst Kirschner among the Germans. This interest originated with me. For almost every major birthday—and sometimes in between when we cannot wait—Denise and I buy each other something we think the other would like. Most of the time we select the pieces together. As I write this, I am beginning to suspect that our collecting may well be an attempt to recapture part of our hopelessly lost youth.

IN RETROSPECT, IT SEEMS A VERY LONG WAY FROM VIENNA TO

Stockholm. My timely departure from Vienna made for a remarkably fortunate life in the United States. The freedom I have experienced in America and in its academic institutions made the Nobel Prize possible for me, as it has for many others. Having been trained in history and the humanities, where one learns early on how depressing life can

be, I am delighted to have ultimately switched to biology, where a delusional optimism still abounds.

Once in a while, reflecting back upon my years in science as I look out at the Hudson River darkening outside my window at the end of another long, exhausting, and often exhilarating day, I find myself filled with wonder to be doing what I am doing. I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both of those careers to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain. And by following my instincts, my unconscious thought processes, and heeding what then seemed an impossibly distant call, I was led into a life I have enjoyed immensely.

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