Education and Career
Gerald Edelman was born in 1929 in Ozone Park, Queens, New York to Jewish parents, physician Edward Edelman, and Anna Freedman Edelman, who worked in the insurance industry. After being raised in New York, he attended college in Pennsylvania where he graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. from Ursinus College in 1950 and received an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1954.
After a year at the Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics, he became a house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital and then practiced medicine in France while serving with US Army Medical Corps. Edelman joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research as a graduate fellow in 1957, working in the laboratory of Henry Kunkel and receiving a Ph.D. in 1960. Rockefeller made him the Assistant (later Associate) Dean of Graduate Studies until 1966, when he became a professor at the school. In 1992, he moved to California and became a professor of neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute.
After his Nobel prize award, Edelman began research into the regulation of primary cellular processes, particularly the control of cell growth and the development in multi-celled organisms, focussing on cell-to-cell interactions in early embryonic development and in the formation and function of the nervous system. These studies led to the discovery of cell adhesion molecules (CAMs), which guide the fundamental processes that help an animal achieve its shape and form, and by which nervous systems are built. One of the most significant discoveries made in this research is that the precursor gene for the neural cell adhesion molecule gave rise in evolution to the entire molecular system of adaptive immunity.
Edelman is the founder and director of The Neurosciences Institute, a nonprofit research center in San Diego that studies the biological bases of higher brain function in humans, and is on the scientific board of the World Knowledge Dialogue project.
Edelman is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.
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