DIETMAR TEMPS
Sixty-four years ago, inspired by cell and molecular biologists who studied complex questions in the simplest available model systems, neuroscientist Eric Kandel bucked then-current trends in brain research by choosing to explore memory using an evolutionarily ancient organism, rather than human subjects.
Kandel began his career in neuroscience studying cells in the human hippocampus, which had been identified as the seat of memory formation by Brenda Milner from McGill University, but he soon realized that it would take a long time to tease apart memory in such a complex system. He shifted his focus to the sea slug Aplysia, a model in which the neural pathway of a simple reflex could be delineated. Aplysia only has 20,000 neurons, and many of them are so large ...
