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The Nobel on Medicine to three explorers of the brain

[Eric] Kandel's research on memory is fascinating. In the 1950s, physiologists were still arguing over the seat of our memories ... . In 1953, a 27-year old patient suffering from epilepsy, identified by the initials H. M., underwent removal of a part of his brain that included almost all the hippocampus. As a result, ... H. M. lost the capacity to fix new memories — his life had stopped at 27 years. Could the hippocampus be the seat of memory? What happens when we fix a memory? Kandel — a 70-year old professor at Columbia University — thought that this very complex problem could be addressed by using a simple biological model. He found this [model] in a sea slug, Aplysia californica, a mollusc with twenty thousand brain cells, five million times fewer than us. Kandel discovered that when Aplysia registers an experience, some synapses, that is, contacts between neurons are stabilized.

Piergiorgio Strata, a neuroscientist at the University of Turin, remembers one of the first times Kandel presented his results, in 1967. “At the talk — Strata says — “was also John Eccles, who had already received the Nobel Prize in 1963 ... Eccles was very open to the work of his younger and more creative colleagues. He was excited by Kandel's work and said to me: `Kandel's approach to the problem will win him a Nobel prize.' Eccles died three years ago and will never know. Still, he had foreseen it, 33 years earlier.”