| 1 | Name: | Dr. Gerald M. Edelman | |
| Institution: | The Scripps Research Institute; The Neurosciences Institute | ||
| Year Elected: | 1977 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1929 | ||
| Death Date: | May 17, 2014 | ||
Biologist Gerald Maurice Edelman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his work on the immune system and his discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. He was a professor of neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute and the founder and director of The Neurosciences Institute, a nonprofit research center that studies the biological basis of higher brain function in humans. Dr. Edelman is noted for his theory of mind, which he elucidated in a trilogy of technical books, and in briefer form for a more general audience in his books Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992) and Wider than the Sky : The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (2004). Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2006) offered reflections on how an understanding of the human brain and the phenomenon of consciousness might impact the nature of human knowledge itself. His other works include Topobiology (1988), which contains a theory of how the original neuronal network of a newborn's brain is established during development of the embryo, and Neural Darwinism (1987), which proposes a theory of memory built around the idea of plasticity in the neural network in response to the environment. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Edelman holds an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University, where he had been a member of the faculty prior to joining the Scripps Institute. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1977. Dr. Edelman died on May 17, 2014, at the age of 84. | |||