Discovery of the Aplysia

Professor Eric Kandel describes how he came to study the model organism Aplysia, which would later earn him a Nobel prize.

I came across Aplysia because I had worked on the hippocampus. I was the first person to do intercellular recording from hippocampal neurons because I had read Brenda Milner's paper, this was 1957. I thought that if I just recorded from the hippocampus memory would speak to me, and I realized the hippocampus was very complicated, and it would take a long while to study how information related to learning comes into the hippocampus and how it is modified by it. So, I thought it would be best to begin, since we knew nothing about learning and memory, with a simpler organism. So, I started going to seminars where different simple preparations were being discussed. And I came across Aplysia, and fell in love with it, and have stayed faithful to it, as I tend to be, for the rest of my career.