Neuroscientist Eric Kandel on The Charlie Rose Show
Mar 30
posted by Steven Erat in
Books, Science, Personal
| 2 Comments
Eric Kandel is a living legend in Neuroscience. A pioneer in the field and author of several of my textbooks on the subject. I recall the comments I used to get on the subway when lugging around his massive 1400 page text on Principles of Neural Science. That text is the Neuroscience bible, and I still have it sitting on my desk at this moment. I'm very excited to watch this video, but I'll have to wait until this weekend.
Set your Tivo to record today's repeat broadcast of this Charlie Rose episode on your local PBS station(s) or watch it online on Google video,
DR. ERIC KANDEL
Neurobiologist / Nobel Laureate
Columbia University / Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Author, "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind"
#1 by Slaid Cleaves on 3/30/06 - 5:46 PM
#2 by Steven Erat on 3/30/06 - 6:03 PM
One reason is that the local and national news on the 3 main networks oversimply and often misinterpret scientific reports. I`m thinking of tracking science reports in the popular media to document my argument. How many times have I watched a medical report on the evening news and thought to myself "What information did they even present?" or "Boy, they don`t have a clue about what that really means!", for example.
Another reason the public might not be aware of the advances it that there`s a huge barrier to meeting federal regulations before a medical or biological discovery can make it into our regular lives. If you looked just at animal testing where the barriers are lower, you can observe the achievements closer to real time. Waiting for a useful discovery to make it from the lab to the hospital could take 5 or 10 years.
Also, most doctors are scientists tend to be humble when interviewed and will often begin by saying "We`re really in the early stages" or "There`s so much we don`t know about it yet". That always annoys me because while they are just being polite, they really don`t give the past researcher proper credit with statements like that.
We were "in nursery school" with Anton von Leeuwenhoek, in junior high school with Mendel, and in the same metaphor we`re surely in our post-doc with 21st century medicine. There`s a lot more information to be discovered, but lets not forget from where we came.