It was fortuitous for Eric Kandel and the world that he came of age at the beginning of the amazing series of neuroscience developments that occurred during the second half of the 20th century—developments sparked principally by the 1953 discovery of DNA. The result is that the 21st century began for Kandel in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for his major discoveries about the underlying neurobiology of learning, memory, and related phenomena. It was quite a journey for a Jewish boy who had to flee Vienna for America at age 10 because of Nazi persecution.

He describes his remarkable personal and professional life in a fascinating autobiography, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006, Norton). Kandel is an excellent writer, and he got competent help to make complex scientific explanations and illustrations more understandable to general readers. The book thus provides excellent non-technical explanations of many brain systems and processes.

The sense one gets in reading the book is that the development of the cognitive neurosciences followed a clearly delineated path, and yet it was quite hit and miss at times. Kandel just makes it all so beautifully obvious—one discovery leading to the next. In the end, the reader has a marvelous sense of the unity of the research trajectory, but also of the major role that neuroimaging technology played in the recent escalation of cognitive neuroscience research capabilities and discoveries.

A personal note: Eric Kandel and I are about the same age. He set out to be a clinical psychiatrist but his interests shifted to neuroscience research. I set out to be a biologist but my interests shifted to teaching and writing—to explain scientific discoveries rather than to make them. I thus studied Kandel's research discoveries from the perspective of a teacher and writer. Reading Kandel's autobiography was a personal delight because it allowed me to relive those years when I struggled to explain to a dubious education profession why research conducted on marine snails was educationally significant.