dr. kandel just said and give us a sense of what it's about. >> well, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, als, as we heard is a motor neuron disease. it's named in this country for the yankees hall of famer lou gehrig who first brought this disease to america's attention. in france it's called charcoze disease named after the pathologist without first described it in the 19th century and in britan and elsewhere it is referred to simply as motor neuron disease. als is a neurodegenerative disease like alzheimer, like huntington and parkinson's disease that you have spoken about on this program before. and it's similar in the sense that it involves the degeneration of a particular population of neurons in the central nervous system. in the case of als the degenerating neurons are motor neurons that reside in the motor cortex in the brain stem and in the spinal cord. at the end stage of disease in als the vast majority of motor neurons are lost. and this is shown in this first image. this is a section through the spinal cord, on the right from the patient with als and on the left from a similarly

dr. eric kandel, noble lawyer yet, professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medic investigatmt i'm peased to have all of them and as always we begin with eric kandel and a sense of what we hope to accomplish this evening. welcome. >> we're going to consider today amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and spinal muscular atrophy, two diseases that affect motor neuron os. and this is a tjs of the theme we've had for the last several programs. which are considered disors that affect the motor system. we began by considering park inson's disease and hunts ton's disease, two diseases that affect motor systems that are due to protein folng disorders. then we considered multiple sclerosis, which has a very different mechanism. it is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the mylin sheath. these two sets of disorders have different mechanisms of action but they share in common the fact that they're fairly widespread in their clinical manifestations. this is in contrast to the two diseases we're goingo consider today. als and spinal muscular atrophy which are specific to motor

dr. eric kandel. he is as you foe by now a nobel laureate, professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator. welcome to one and all. i begin with you as always, eric. tell me what we will discover this evening. >> in the last program we consider hunngton's disease and parkinson's disease. these are protein-folding disorders that cause degeneration of the nervous system. today we're going to consider a deagain rattive disease, multiple ser sclero that has a very different cause. it is an autoimmune disease. so the immune system developed in order to protect us against foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria. and an occasion it errs and recognizes a protein in the body and becomes the target of an immune attack. it's been obvious to my peoplell along that the variety of organs in the body that are susceptible to this kind of attack. for example, we've known that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that hits cells in the pancreas, that release insulin or crohn's disease i

dr. eric kandel back at this table where he comes frequently, welcome. >> nice of you to have me here. >> rose: the age of insight, why call it the age of insight? >> in the 1900 was a very special period, at the end of the 1900s in which our view of human kind was altered. before that, there was a view of human beings as being essentially rational creatures, specially created by god, this is the view of the enlightenment, it would be different from all other animal species, and then darwin came along and documented how we evolved from simple ancestors, and made us realize that there is a continuity in evolution, and the viennese extended this to pointing out that the human mind is also complicated and not completely rational. there are many irrational components and the idea of an important aspect of the mind being unconscious mental processes, instincts that control our behavior emerged in 1900, and emerged from several different influences that i tried to describe here. >> rose: just a bit of history, because it is vienna and vienna is a place you lived until age nine? >> that's right.