Gerald Edelman Essay

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Gerald Edelman

Gerald Edelman’s life commenced on July 1st, 1929, in Ozone Park, New York City, New York. After Edelman graduated from high school in New York he went on to study at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania and receive the B.S. degree in 1950. He then continued with his studies and received a M.D. degree in 1954 at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania (Nobelprize.org).

Gerald Edelman has accomplished many discoveries in the field of science. Some of these fields include cell biology, biophysics, immunology, protein chemistry, and neurobiology (Nobelprize.com). However, his largest leaps may have been in biology, particularly immunology, and neurology. At the beginning of his career he was working in the area of immunization. He was the man that analyzed the …show more content…

For example, Roger Sperry a neurologist from 1963 suggested that billions of intricate connections in the brain were each ascertained by distinct chemical markers on each neuron. According to this theory, particular genes supposedly arrange a code for each of the markers (Rosenfield). As stated in the above paragraph Edelman was more concerned with the bigger picture when it comes to scientific question, so when approached by this topic, he dealt with the deeper issue of the relationship between genes, and the form and structure (Rosenfield).

Other scientists who were working at the time were Francis Crick, Max Velmans, Schneider, Phillip David Zelazo, and Cristof Koch (NCBI). Crick also turned to the field of neurology after coming upon a major breakthrough in the biology field (Seth). Crick deemed a new field of science “molecular psychology” (NCBI). Zelazo researched the control of human emotion, thought, and actions (umn.edu). Koch is a neuroscientist, whose main interest is in experimental, theoretical, and computational neuroscience