In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (49 page)

The city fathers in Bettauer’s book had no choice but to plead with the Jews to return to Vienna. Sadly, that ending is as unrealistic today as it was eighty years ago.

I RETURNED TO VIENNA IN SEPTEMBER
2004
TO CELEBRATE
THE publication of the symposium volume and to attend the fall meeting of the Orden pour le Mérite. The Orden, originally established in 1748 by Frederick the Great of Prussia, consists of leading scholars, scientists, and artists, half of whom are native Germans and half foreigners who speak German. In addition, Denise and I decided, at the urging of our children, to observe Yom Kippur in the main synagogue of Vienna.

When we arrived at the synagogue, it was surrounded by security guards who were worried about both Austrian and Arab anti-Semitic violence. Once we were allowed to enter, we discovered that the congregation had reserved a seat for each of us in the first row of the men’s and women’s sections, respectively. At one point in the service, the rabbi, Paul Chaim Eisenberg, wanted to honor me and asked me to come up on the stage and open the curtains of the Ark that contains the Torah scrolls. My eyes filled with tears; I froze and could not bring myself to do it.

The next day I joined the meeting of the Orden. We met together with an Austrian honorary society, the Ehrenzeichen für Wissenschaft und Kunst, and heard the vigorous and well-known eighty-year-old urban geographer Elisabeth Lichtenberger, who has published a number of books including an important study of the social and economic structure of Vienna’s Ringstrasse, present a lecture on the future of Europe. As we broke for lunch, Lichtenberger sought me out to obtain my thoughts about the differences between life in Austria and the United States. I told her that I was a poor person to ask: for me there was no comparison. I barely escaped with my life from Vienna in 1939, whereas I have had a privileged life in the United States.

Lichtenberger then leaned over to me and said, Let me explain what happened in 1938 and 1939. There was massive unemployment in Vienna until 1938. I felt that in my family, people were poor and oppressed. The Jews controlled everything—the banks, the newspapers. Most physicians were Jewish, and they were simply squeezing every penny out of these impoverished people. It was terrible. That’s why it all happened.

At first I thought she was joking, but as I realized she was not, I turned to her and literally screamed, “
Ich glaube nicht was Sie mir sagen
!” “I can’t believe you are talking to me this way! You, an academic, are blindly mouthing anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda!”

Within a few minutes everyone around our table turned with astonishment as I continued to berate her. Finally, seeing that I had no effect on her, I turned my back on her and engaged the person on the other side of me in conversation.

My confrontation with Lichtenberger was the first of three revealing conversations I had with Austrians of different ages during that visit in September 2004. The second occurred when a woman of about fifty, a Vienna-born secretary for an Austrian colleague in the Orden, quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, turned to me and said, “I am so glad I read your comments at the symposium last year. Until then I knew nothing about the Kristallnacht!” Finally, a young Austrian businessman in the hotel lobby recognized me and said, “It is so wonderful for you to come to Vienna again. It must be so difficult for you to do so!”

These opinions probably reflect accurately the spectrum of Austrian attitudes toward the Jews, a spectrum dependent largely on age. My hope is that the difference in the three generations’ attitudes may signal a lessening of anti-Semitism in Austria. Even some of the Jews in Vienna see this.

Two other events were even more encouraging. The first was at the book conference, when Georg Winkler, dean of the faculty at the University of Vienna, introduced me. Winkler went out of his way to acknowledge the collaboration of the university with the Nazis and to apologize for it. “The University of Vienna has waited too long to do its own analysis and make transparent its involvement with National Socialism,” he stated.

The second took place at a social event I attended with the Orden at the Hofburg, the royal palace formerly occupied by the Habsburgs. While in Vienna, I had learned that President Klestil, who had invited me four years earlier to organize the symposium, had recently died. At the event I met the newly elected president of Austria, Heinz Fischer. He immediately recognized my name and invited Denise and me to join him and his wife for a private dinner at the Hotel Sacher. The president told us that his wife’s father had been put in a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1938 and was released only because he had obtained a visa for Sweden. Both President Fischer and his wife had made a major effort to encourage Karl Popper and other former Jewish émigrés to return and settle in Vienna.

The new president is even more involved with Jewish life in Vienna than the former one. In addition, I found it uplifting to think that sixty-five years after being forced to leave Vienna, I would be invited by the president of Austria to join with him in a private and frank conversation about Jewish life in Vienna over wine, dinner, and Sacher torte at the Hotel Sacher.

ON OCTOBER 4, OUR LAST DAY IN VIENNA, DENISE AND I
stopped at Severingasse 8 on our way to the airport. We did not try to enter the apartment house or visit the small set of rooms I had left sixty-five years before. We merely stood outside and watched the sun’s rays bathe the peeling wooden door. I felt amazingly at peace: so glad to have survived, and to have emerged from that building and from the Holocaust relatively unscathed.

A
fter fifty years of teaching and research, I continue to find that doing science at a university—in my case, Columbia University—is unendingly interesting. I derive great joy from thinking about how memory works, developing specific ideas about how it persists, shaping those ideas through discussions with students and colleagues, and then seeing how they are corrected as the experiments play out. I continue to explore the science in which I work almost like a child, with a naïve joy, curiosity, and amazement. I feel particularly privileged to be working in the biology of mind, an area that—unlike my first love, psychoanalysis—has grown magnificently in the last fifty years.

In reviewing those years, I am impressed with how little there was initially to suggest that biology would become the passion of my professional life. Had I not been exposed in Harry Grundfest’s laboratory to the excitement of actually doing research, of carrying out experiments to discover something new, I would have ended up with a very different career and, I presume, a very different life. In the first two years of medical school I took the required basic science courses, but until I had actually done research, I saw my scientific education as a prerequisite for doing what I really cared about—practicing medicine, taking care of patients, understanding their illnesses, and preparing to become a psychoanalyst. I was astonished to discover that working in the laboratory—
doing
science in collaboration with interesting and creative people—is dramatically different from taking courses and reading about science.

Indeed, I find the process of doing science, of exploring biological mysteries on a day-to-day basis, deeply rewarding, not only intellectually but also emotionally and socially. Doing experiments gives me the thrill of discovering anew the wonders of the world. Moreover, science is done in an intense and endlessly engrossing social context. The life of a biological scientist in the United States is a life of discussion and debate—it is the Talmudic tradition writ large. But rather than annotate a religious text, we annotate texts written by evolutionary processes working over hundreds of millions of years. Few other human endeavors engender as great a feeling of camaraderie with colleagues young and old, students and mentors alike, as making an interesting discovery together.

The egalitarian social structure of American science encourages this camaraderie. Collaboration in a modern biology laboratory is dynamic, extending not only from the top down but also, importantly, from the bottom up. Life at an American university bridges gaps in both age and status in ways that I have always found inspiring. François Jacob, the French molecular geneticist whose work so influenced my thinking, told me that what impressed him most about the United States on his first visit was the fact that graduate students called Arthur Kornberg, a world-famous DNA biochemist, by his first name. That was no surprise to me. Grundfest and Purpura and Kuffler always treated me and all their students as equals. Yet this would not—could not—have taken place in the Austria, the Germany, the France, or perhaps even the England of 1955. In the United States, young people speak up and are listened to if they have interesting things to say. Therefore, I have learned not only from my mentors, but also from my daily interaction with an extraordinary group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

In thinking about the students and postdoctoral fellows with whom I have collaborated in my laboratory, I am reminded of the painting workshop of the Renaissance artist Andrea del Verrocchio. In the period from 1470 to 1475, his workshop was filled with a succession of gifted young artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, who studied there and, while doing so, made major contributions to the canvases that Verrocchio painted. To this day, people point to Verrocchio’s
Baptism of Christ
, which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, and say, “That beautiful kneeling angel on the left was painted in 1472 by Leonardo.” Similarly, when I give talks and project giant drawings of
Aplysia
neurons and their synapses onto an auditorium screen, I tell my audience, “This new culture system was developed by Kelsey Martin, this CREB activator and repressor were found by Dusan Bartsch, and these wonderful prion-like molecules at the synapse were discovered by Kausik Si!”

AT ITS BEST, THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY IS INFUSED WITH
A marvelous sense of collegiality and common purpose, not only in the United States but throughout the world. As pleased as I am about what my colleagues and I have been able to contribute to the emerging picture of memory storage in the brain, I am even more proud to be part of the accomplishments of the international community of scientists that has given rise to a new science of mind.

Within the span of my career the biological community has advanced almost unerringly from understanding the molecular nature of the gene and the genetic code to reading the code of the entire human genome and unraveling the genetic basis of many human diseases. We now stand at the threshold of understanding many aspects of mental functioning, including mental disorders, and perhaps someday even the biological basis of consciousness. The total accomplishment—the synthesis that has occurred within the biological sciences in the last fifty years—is phenomenal. It has brought biology, once a descriptive science, to a level of rigor, mechanistic understanding, and scientific excitement comparable to that of physics and chemistry. At the time I entered medical school, most physicists and chemists regarded biology as a “soft science” today, physicists and chemists are flocking into biological fields, along with computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.

Let me give an example of this synthesis in the biological sciences. Soon after I began to use cell biology to link neurons to brain function and behavior in
Aplysia
, Sydney Brenner and Seymour Benzer began to look for genetic approaches to link neurons to brain function and behavior in two other simple animals. Brenner studied the behavior of the tiny worm
C. elegans
, which has only 302 cells in its central nerve cord. Benzer studied the behavior of the fruit fly,
Drosophila
. Each experimental system has distinct advantages and drawbacks.
Aplysia
has large, easily accessible nerve cells, but it is not optimal for traditional genetics;
C. elegans
and
Drosophila
are highly suitable for genetic experiments, but their nerve cells are small and not well suited to studies of cell biology.

For twenty years these experimental systems developed within different traditions and along largely separate lines. The parallels inherent in them were not apparent. But the power of modern biology has drawn them progressively closer. In
Aplysia
, first with recombinant DNA techniques and now with a nearly complete map of the DNA in its genome, we have the power to transfer and manipulate genes in individual cells. In a complementary way, new advances in cell biology and the introduction of more sophisticated behavioral analyses make possible cellular approaches to the behavior of the fruit fly and the worm. As a result, the molecular conservation that has so powerfully characterized the biology of genes and proteins is now being seen in the biology of cells, neural circuits, behavior, and learning.

ALTHOUGH DEEPLY SATISFYING, A CAREER IN SCIENCE IS BY NO
means easy. I have experienced many moments of intense pleasure along the way, and the day-to-day activity is wonderfully invigorating intellectually. But the fun of doing science is to explore domains of knowledge that are relatively unknown. Like anyone who ventures into the unknown, I have at times felt alone, uncertain, without a well-trodden path to follow. Every time I embarked on a new course, there were well-meaning people, both social friends and scientific colleagues, who advised against it. I had to learn early on to be comfortable with insecurity and to trust my own judgment on key issues.

My experience is hardly unique. Most scientists who have tried to pursue even slightly new directions in their research, with all the difficulty and frustration these paths entail, tell similar stories of cautionary advice urging them not to take risks. For most of us, however, cautions against going forward only kindle the spirit of adventure.

The most difficult career decision of my life was to leave the potential security of a practice in psychiatry for the uncertainty of research. Despite the fact that I was a well-trained psychiatrist and enjoyed working with patients, I decided in 1965, with Denise’s encouragement to devote myself to full-time research. In an upbeat frame of mind, having put this decision behind us, Denise and I took a brief holiday. We accepted an invitation from my good friend Henry Nunberg to spend a few days at his parents’ summer home in Yorktown Heights, New York. Henry was then pursuing a residency in psychiatry at my hospital, the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Denise and I knew his parents moderately well.

Henry’s father, Herman Nunberg, was an outstanding psychoanalyst and an influential teacher whose textbook I much admired for its clarity. He had a broad, albeit dogmatic interest in many aspects of psychiatry. At our first dinner together, I enthusiastically outlined my new career plans of learning in
Aplysia
. Herman Nunberg looked at me in amazement and muttered, “It sounds to me as if your psychoanalysis was not fully successful; you seem never really to have quite resolved your transference.”

I found that comment both humorous and irrelevant—and typical of many American psychoanalysts of the 1960s, who simply could not understand that an interest in brain research need not imply a rejection of psychoanalysis. If Herman Nunberg were alive today, it is almost inconceivable that he would pass the same judgment on a psychoanalysis-oriented psychiatrist who moved into brain science.

This theme recurred periodically throughout the first twenty years of my career. In 1986, when Morton Reiser retired as chairman of the department of psychiatry at Yale University, he invited several colleagues, including me, to give a talk at a symposium held in his honor. One of the invitees was Reiser’s close associate Marshall Edelson, a well-known professor of psychiatry and director of education and medical studies for the department of psychiatry at Yale. In his lecture, Edelson argued that efforts to connect psychoanalytic theory to a neurobiological foundation, or to try to develop ideas about how different mental processes are mediated by different systems in the brain, were an expression of a deep logical confusion. Mind and body must be dealt with separately, he continued. We cannot seek causal connections between them. Scientists will eventually conclude, he argued, that the distinction between mind and body is not a temporary methodological stumbling block stemming from the inadequacy of our current ways of thought, but rather an absolute, logical, and conceptual barrier that no future developments can ever overcome.

When my turn came, I gave a paper on learning and memory in the snail. I pointed out that all mental processes, from the most prosaic to the most sublime, emanate from the brain. Moreover, all mental illness, regardless of symptoms, must be associated with distinctive alterations in the brain. Edelson rose during the discussion and said that, while he agreed that psychotic illnesses were disorders of brain function, the disorders that Freud described and that are seen in practice by psychoanalysts, such as obsessive-compulsive neurosis and anxiety states, could not be explained on the basis of brain function.

Edelson’s views and Herman Nunberg’s more personal judgment are idiosyncratic extremes, but they are representative of the thinking of a surprisingly large number of psychoanalysts not so many years ago. The insularity of such views, particularly the unwillingness to think about psychoanalysis in the broader context of neural science, hindered the growth of psychoanalysis during biology’s recent golden age. In retrospect, it was probably not that Nunberg, or perhaps even Edelson, really thought that mind and brain were separate; it was rather that they did not know how to join them.

Since the 1980s the way in which mind and brain should be joined has become clearer. Consequently, psychiatry has taken on a new role. It has become a stimulus to modern biological thought as well as a beneficiary of it. In the last few years I have seen significant interest in the biology of mind within the psychoanalytic community. We now understand that every mental state is a brain state and every mental disorder is a disorder of brain function. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain.

I encountered a different type of negative reaction when I turned from studying the hippocampus in the mammalian brain to studying simple forms of learning in the sea snail. There was a strong sense at the time among scientists working on the mammalian brain that it was radically different from the brain of lower vertebrates like fish and frogs and incomparably more complex than that of invertebrates. The fact that Hodgkin, Huxley, and Katz had provided a basis for studying the nervous system by studying the giant axon of the squid and the nerve-muscle synapse of the frog was seen by these mammalian chauvinists as an exception. Of course all nerve cells are similar, they conceded, but neural circuitry and behavior are very different in vertebrates and invertebrates. This schism persisted until molecular biology began to reveal the amazing conservation of genes and proteins throughout evolution.

Finally, there were continued disputes about whether any of the cellular or molecular mechanisms of learning and memory revealed by studies of simple animals were likely to be generalizable to more complex animals. In particular, there were arguments about whether sensitization and habituation are useful forms of memory to study. The ethologists, who study behavior in animals in their natural environments, emphasized the importance and generality of these two simple forms of memory. But the behaviorists emphasized primarily associative forms of learning, such as classical and operant conditioning, which are clearly more complex.