John Eccles: 'To the brains of our predecessors we owe all of our inheritance of civilization and culture', Nobel banquet speech - 1963

10 December 1963, Stockholm, Sweden

Sir John Eccles receives his Nobel laureate first, followed by Allan L. Hodgkin, Andrew F. Huxley. He was an Australian who was educated at Warnambool High School and University of Melbourne School of Medicine. This is his banquet speech to students.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow students, Mr. Drakenberg.

I have the great honour to reply on behalf of the Laureates on this magnificent occasion. We have greatly enjoyed your festive display and the fine style of your dancing and singing. As an old folk-dancer I particularly appreciated the grace and precision of your dancing. But it is to your thoughtful and sincere speech of welcome and congratulation that I wish especially to reply. This is the greatest day of our lives - the climax of long years of creative work. We feel a great expansion of personality. And now as I speak to you I feel elevated, as on some high platform. Let me then speak to you as an old student of some 60 years and give you young students two thoughts that have come to me with special vividness in these last years.

Firstly, I think we must realize the full negative impact of the new knowledge derived from the study of the moon, Venus and Mars and of the problems of space travel. As physiologists we can now predict with complete assurance that "Man is forever earth-bound". There is absolutely no possible place for man to live other than on this earth. We and our fellow men of all countries must realize that we share this wonderful, beautiful, salubrious earth as brothers and that there never will be anywhere else to go. This revelation should strongly reinforce the plea of Mr. Drakenberg for a world Government by United Nations.

My second thought is that in this present age we have tremendously underestimated the importance of biology. Possibly life is only in this planet, and even here only in an infinitesimally small fraction of the matter of this earth; yet it is of transcendent importance to us. We are of it, we are in the evolutionary story. The origin of each of us stems from codes of genetic inheritance. For us the most significant questions we can ask scientifically concern the working of our nervous systems - the marvellous reception, communication and storage devices that subserve all our perception, our thoughts, our memories, our actions, our creative imaginations, our ideals. To the brains of our predecessors we owe all of our inheritance of civilization and culture. And now we have the power of progress with great success in this study of nervous systems though of course we are still at a primitive level of understanding. This work needs the concentrated efforts of great intellects in the scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, mathematics, as well as in biology. But as yet these great opportunities are relatively neglected as our scientific vision turns outwards from ourselves to the immensities of space and time and to the ultimate structure of matter. I am passionately devoted to the study of life, and particularly to the higher forms of life. For me the one great question that has dominated my life is: "What am I?" What is the meaning of this marvellous gift of life? The more we know, the more the mystery grows.

If you ask me: "What would I do if I were to begin my life's work now?" I would reply: "I would start where I have left off." I do hope that some of you young students accept this great challenge of trying to understand man scientifically, and that you devote yourselves with passion and joy to your chosen work, as Alfred Nobel would so much have desired. I finish by saying to you all: May God bless you!

Eccles award was shared with Allan L. Hodgkin, Andrew F. Huxley.

Eric Kandel: 'We have found that the neural networks of the brain are not fixed', Nobel banquet speech - 2000

10 December 2000, Stockholm, Sweden

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Members of the Nobel Assembly, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Engraved above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was the maxim "Know thyself." Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior. But, in their quest for self-understanding, past generations have been confined intellectually, because their questions about mind have been restricted to the traditional frameworks of classical philosophy and psychology. They have asked: Are mental processes different from physical processes? How do new experiences become incorporated into the mind as memory?

Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and I, the three of us whom you honor here tonight, and our generation of scientists, have attempted to translate abstract philosophical questions about mind into the empirical language of biology. The key principle that guides our work is that the mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, an astonishingly complex computational device that constructs our perception of the external world, fixes our attention, and controls our actions.

We three have taken the first steps in linking mind to molecules by determining how the biochemistry of signaling within and between nerve cells is related to mental processes and to mental disorders. We have found that the neural networks of the brain are not fixed, but that communication between nerve cells can be regulated by neurotransmitter molecules discovered here in Sweden by your great school of molecular pharmacology.

In looking toward the future, our generation of scientists has come to believe that the biology of the mind will be as scientifically important to this century as the biology of the gene has been to the 20th century. In a larger sense, the biological study of mind is more than a scientific inquiry of great promise; it is also an important humanistic endeavor. The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience. Insights that come from this new synthesis will not only improve our understanding of psychiatric and neurological disorders, but will also lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Indeed, even in our generation, we already have gained initial biological insights toward a deeper understanding of the self. We know that even though the words of the maxim are no longer encoded in stone at Delphi, they are encoded in our brains. For centuries the maxim has been preserved in human memory by these very molecular processes in the brain that you graciously recognize today, and that we are just beginning to understand.

On a personal note, allow me to thank Your Majesties, on behalf of all of us, for this splendid evening, and to raise a toast to self-understanding. Skoal!

Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard