Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel Condemns Censorship Of Scientists; Calls Current Cl

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Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel Condemns " Censorship " Of Scientists; Calls

Current Climate For Science As " Disastrous " As McCarthy Era

 

 

Noting that it's " a terrible time for science " in the U.S., Nobel

Laureate Eric Kandel has compared the effects of government science

policy to the Eisenhower-McCarthy era, when scientists were persecuted

for their political beliefs.

 

Kandel's remarks came during an interview with Science & the City, the

webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences, about his new memoir, In

Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (Norton,

March 2006).

 

" There's very little funding, there's political censorship about what

one does and how one speaks about it, " he said. " I think the

scientific community is extremely concerned about the future of this

country given the restrictions on science at the moment. "

 

He added later that these restrictions are " all the more tragic since

biomedical research is at a wonderfully productive point right now and

in a position to have a profound impact on the treatment of disease.

Moreover, the country is training the next generation of scientists

and unless more funding is forthcoming, we cannot assure their future

or the American leadership in science. "

 

Science & The City spoke with the 76-year-old Columbia University

professor of Physiology and Cell Biology at the launch of his new book

at the Academy Readers & Writers lecture series. Kandel is a member of

the Academy's President's Council.

 

Not a Political Commentary

 

In the book, Kandel recalls how his mentor, Harry Grundfest, a

neurologist at Columbia University, suffered a career setback when he

was denied NIH funding during the height of the McCarthy-era Communist

witch hunts. Kandel told Science & the City that he considers the

current political climate " equally disastrous " for scientists.

 

" From a restrictive point of view, this is an even more painful era in

some ways than the Eisenhower-McCarthy era, " Kandel said. The

difference, he added, is that " during the Eisenhower-McCarthy era, the

opposition to McCarthy was quite strong, and the government itself

felt ambivalent about McCarthy. "

 

Despite his strong feelings on the subject, Kandel, who emigrated to

the U.S. as a child after fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna and went on to

win the 2000 Nobel Prize for his work on the physiological basis of

memory storage in neurons, explained that his autobiography is not a

�political commentary� and does not make references to Bush

Administration science policies.

 

" I thought other people writing about it would discuss it more

effectively, and they have, so I didn't go into that, but I certainly

feel it and in other contexts I have, " he said.

 

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind is part

personal memoir and part history of brain science. The title comes

from Kandel's observation that advances in four different disciplines

- behaviorist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and

molecular biology - have converged and given scientists opportunities

to examine the brain in novel ways.

 

" We are now in a better position to bring together cognitive

psychological studies and molecular studies so that a coherent

approach to mental function can be developed, " he said. " With imaging,

for example, we have tools for looking inside the active human brain,

enabling us to have a new synthesis that wasn't possible years ago. "

 

To hear all of Kandel's provocative interview with Science & The City

editor Adrienne Burke, visit www.scienceandthecity.org/podcast.

 

Science & The City is the webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Serving more than 100,000 readers in the general public as well as the

scientific community, Science & the City features a daily-updated

calendar of all events happening at the intersection of science and

culture in the New York metropolitan region. Science & the City also

features weekly podcasts and articles about New York scientists and

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Podcasts.

 

Science & The City

http://www.nyas.org