In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (22 page)

What most impressed us was how readily the strength of synapses could be altered by different patterns of stimuli. This suggested that synaptic plasticity is built into the very nature of the chemical synapse, its molecular architecture. In the broadest terms it suggested that the flow of information in the various neural circuits of the brain could be modified by learning. We did not know whether synaptic plasticity was an element of actual learning in the intact, behaving animal, but our results suggested that the possibility was very much worth pursuing.

Aplysia
was proving to be more than a wonderfully informative experimental system; it was an extremely enjoyable one to work with as well. What had started out as an infatuation based on the hope of finding a suitable animal was turning into a serious commitment. Moreover, because
Aplysia’s
cells are large (cell R2, in particular, is gigantic—1 millimeter in diameter and visible to the naked eye), the technical demands of the experiments were less severe than those on the hippocampus.

The experiments were also more leisurely. Because placing a tiny electrode into such a gigantic cell causes essentially no damage, one can effortlessly record from cell R2 for five to ten hours. I could go to lunch and come back to find the cell still in perfect health, waiting for me to pick up the experiment where I had left off. This compared very favorably to the many nights Alden and I had had to work to obtain an occasional recording of ten to thirty minutes from the pyramidal cells of the hippocampus. A typical experiment in
Aplysia
could be completed in six to eight hours: as a result, the experiments became great fun.

In this mood, after a season of working on
Aplysia
, I was reminded of a story Bernard Katz had told me about the great physiologist A. V. Hill, his mentor at University College, London. On Hill’s first visit to the United States, in 1924, shortly after having won the Nobel Prize at age thirty-six for his work on the mechanism of muscular contraction, he gave a talk on the subject at a scientific meeting. At the end of the talk, an elderly gentleman rose and asked him about the practical use of his research.

Hill pondered for a moment as to whether he should enumerate the many instances in which great benefits for mankind have arisen from experiments undertaken purely to satisfy intellectual curiosity. Rather than take this path, however, he simply turned to the man and said with a smile, “To tell the truth, sir, we don’t do it because it’s useful; we do it because it’s amusing.”

On a personal level, these studies were pivotal to my confidence as an independent scientist. When I first arrived and talked about learning and analogs of learning, the other postdoctoral fellows’ eyes simply glazed over. In 1962, talking to most cellular neurobiologists about learning was a little bit like talking to the moon. By the time I left, however, the tenor of discussions in the laboratory had changed.

I also felt that I was developing a style of doing science. Even though I still felt myself inadequately trained in some areas, I proved to be quite bold in approaching scientific problems. I did experiments that I thought were interesting and important. Without quite knowing it, I had found my voice, much as a writer must feel after having written a number of satisfactory stories. With that finding came self-assurance, a sense that I could make a go of it in science. After my fellowship with Tauc, I never again had the fear that I would run out of ideas. I had many moments of disappointment, despondency, and exhaustion, but I always found that by reading the literature and showing up at my lab looking at the data as they emerged day by day and discussing them with my students and postdoctoral fellows, I would gain a notion of what to do next. We would then discuss these ideas over and over again. When I tackled the next problem, I would immerse myself in reading about it.

As I had done when selecting
Aplysia
to study, I learned to trust my instincts, to unconsciously follow my nose. Maturation as a scientist involves many components, but a key one for me was the development of taste, much as it is in the enjoyment of art, music, food, or wine. One needs to learn what problems are important. I sensed myself developing taste, distinguishing what was interesting from what was not—and among the things that were interesting, I also learned what was doable.

BEYOND THE PLEASURE OF THE SCIENCE, OUR FOURTEEN MONTHS
’ stay in France was a transforming experience for Denise and me. Because we so enjoyed Paris and because
Aplysia
was so easy to work with, I did not work on weekends for the first time in years and was home for dinner every night at seven. We used our leisure time to see Paris and its environs. We began to visit art galleries and museums on a regular basis, and we purchased, after much financial agonizing, our first works of art. One was a wonderful self-portrait in oil by Claude Weisbusch, an Alsatian artist who had recently won an award as the young painter of the year and who used rapid, nervous strokes reminiscent of Kokoschka. We also bought a tender Mother and Child, an oil by Akira Tanaka. Our largest investment was a beautiful etching by Picasso of the artist and his models, number 82 of the Vollard Suite, published in 1934. In this marvelous etching, each of the four women is drawn in a different style. Denise thought she could recognize three of these women as having been important to Picasso at different points in his early life: Olga Koklova, Sarah Murphy, and Marie-Thérèse Walter. We still greatly enjoy looking at these three beautiful works.

The French species of
Aplysia
that Ladislav Tauc worked with came from the Atlantic Ocean. The system for supplying the snails was not very reliable, so it was difficult to obtain them in Paris. We therefore spent close to the entire autumn of 1962 and 1963 in Arcachon, a beautiful little resort not far from Bordeaux. I conducted most of my experiments on
Aplysia
in Arcachon and then analyzed the data in Paris, where I also carried out some experiments on the land snail.

As if several months in Arcachon were not vacation enough, Tauc, the members of his laboratory, and all of France considered vacationing during the month of August sacred. We joined in that belief. We rented a house on the Mediterranean in the Italian town of Marina di Pietra Santa, about an hour and a half from Florence, and we visited the city three or four times a week. On other holidays, we would travel near and far. We went to Versailles, just outside of Paris, and to Cahors, in the south of France, to visit the convent where Denise was hidden during the war.

In Cahors, we spoke to a nun who remembered Denise and showed us pictures of her dormitory room, with ten cots arranged neatly on each side, and a photograph of Denise with the other girls in her class. The nun pointed out that one of the other girls was also Jewish but that neither Denise nor this girl knew of the other’s identity. To protect them, none of the students was informed that there were Jews among them. Each of the Jewish girls was taken aside by the Mother Superior and shown a private escape route, a passage through a tunnel to be used if the Gestapo came searching for Jewish students.

About twenty miles from Cahors, in a very small village of two hundred inhabitants, we visited the baker Alfred Aymard and his wife, Louise, who had sheltered Denise’s brother. That was certainly one of the most remarkable days in our year in France. Aymard, a Communist, took in Denise’s brother not because he necessarily liked Jews, but because he hated the Nazis. Within a few months, he came to adore Jean-Claude and had a difficult time parting with him at the end of the war. The Bystryns sensed this difficulty and in the years after the war spent part of each summer vacationing with Aymard and his wife.

When we arrived for our visit, Aymard insisted that we stay overnight. He had recently suffered a stroke, which slowed his speech and left him partially paralyzed on the left side, but he was nonetheless jovial and extremely generous. He cleared out his and his wife’s bedroom and ran an electric extension cord into the bedroom so we could have better light. Despite my repeated insistence that he stay in their room, Aymard and his wife insisted that we, the guests, should have the best room while the two of them slept in the kitchen. During dinner, we tried to repay his kindness with one story after another about Jean-Claude, whom Aymard still missed seventeen years later.

In another trip Denise and I shall not readily forget, we stayed for the night in Carcassonne, a medieval walled city in the south of France. We arrived in the late evening and had a difficult time finding a room. Finally, we located one in a small hotel. The room, however, had only a single, rather large bed. We put Paul in the center, changed into our sleeping clothes, and climbed into bed on either side of him. Accustomed to sleeping alone, Paul instantly rebelled and started to scream in protest. We tried repeatedly to calm him down; when this failed, we climbed out of the bed and lay down on either side of it, surrendering it to him. Denise and I at first appreciated the quiet we had won by lying on the floor. But after ten minutes of discomfort, we realized that we could not easily fall asleep there. So we turned from being progressive parents to being disciplinarians. We climbed back into bed and resolutely refused to leave. Within minutes, all was calm and the three of us slept through the night.

Living in France also enabled me to see my brother on a regular basis. When we had arrived in New York from Vienna in 1939, Lewis was fourteen and had been an academic star throughout his school years. Despite his academic ambitions, he sensed that his major efforts should be to help support our family, since my father’s income was small and the Depression had not yet ended. So rather than enrolling in an academic curriculum, he went to the New York High School for Specialty Trades and learned to be a printer, a trade he enjoyed because he liked books so much. Through high school and his first two years at Brooklyn College, Lewis worked part-time for a printer; this gave him some money for our family plus a bit extra to feed his addiction to Wagnerian opera, a habit he satisfied by purchasing standing-room tickets. When he was nineteen, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Europe, where he fought and was wounded by shrapnel in the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last-ditch effort to keep the advancing American army at bay.

Upon receiving an honorable discharge, Lewis joined the army reserve and rose to the rank of lieutenant. All service personnel were eligible for the G.I. Bill, which enabled them to go to the college of their choice tuition free. Lewis went back to Brooklyn College and continued to study engineering and German literature. Shortly after graduating, he married Elise Wilker, a Viennese émigré whom he had met at college, and he entered the graduate program in German studies at Brown University. In 1952 he began work on his Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics and Middle High German. In the midst of writing it, with the Korean War still going on, Lewis was offered an assignment to the U.S. embassy in Paris. He took that opportunity, and in 1953 he and Elise drove to New York to visit the family before the two of them were to ship out. One night while they were dining out, someone broke into their car and stole their belongings, including Lewis’s research notes and the early drafts of his dissertation. He tried at first to reconstruct his work, but he never succeeded in overcoming this setback to his academic career.

After serving as an officer at the embassy, Lewis took on a second assignment in France, as the civilian comptroller of a U.S. air force base in Bar-le-Duc. He eventually became so fond of his life in France and his growing family of five children that he abandoned his plan to return to academic life. He decided to remain in France and became a connoisseur of fine wines and cheeses.

Lewis and Elise’s youngest child, Billy, was born in 1961. A few weeks after his birth, Billy developed a high fever from an infection, which frightened Elise greatly. Earlier, she and Lewis had become friends with the Baptist chaplain on the base, whose discussions of Christianity appealed to her search for greater religious involvement. She promised herself that if Billy survived, she would acknowledge the intervention of Christ by converting to Christianity. Billy survived and Elise converted.

When Lewis called to tell of Elise’s conversion, my mother failed to appreciate that Elise could be motivated by a search for faith and became extremely upset. To her, this was not a question of accepting a Christian daughter-in-law into our family. Both Lewis and I had had relationships with non-Jewish women, and my mother was prepared to accept the possibility that one of us might marry a non-Jew. But she found Elise’s conversion very different. Elise was Jewish. She had been born in Vienna, experienced anti-Semitism, survived, and was now abandoning Judaism. Why did Jews struggle to survive, my mother argued, if not to continue our cultural heritage? To her, the essence of Judaism lay less in the conception of God than in what she saw as the social and intellectual values of Judaism. My mother could not help comparing Elise’s actions with those of Denise’s mother, who had sacrificed peace of mind and even her daughter’s safety in order for Denise to maintain her cultural and historical continuity as a Jew.

Elise and I were on good terms, yet she had never discussed her desire to convert or her search for greater spiritual values with me. I could not grasp what had happened and I worried that this might reflect a psychological crisis in response to Billy’s birth, perhaps a postpartum depression. Failing to persuade Elise over the telephone, my mother flew to Bar-le-Duc and spent two weeks with Lewis and Elise, but she did not alter Elise’s conviction.