NOBEL SIGNED. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection

New York: Basic Books, 1987. First edition, first printing.

FIRST PRINTING OF PIONEERING APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY TO NEUROLOGY, INSCRIBED FROM ONE NOBEL LAUREATE TO ANOTHER.

9 1/2 inches tall hardcover, publisher's blue cloth binding, gilt title to spine, inscribed front free endpaper, "For Marshall Nirenberg/ My warm regards/ and admiration/ Gerry", i-xxii, 371 pp, many figures in text, folding color plate. Near fine in near fine jacket in protective mylar sleeve.

GERALD M. EDELMAN (1929 – 2014) was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and in philosophy of mind. Obituary published in Science, 27 June 2014: "Edelman's work in the 1960s revealed the chemical structure of antibody molecules, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1972. While the discovery of the structure of antibody and of CAMs are undisputed landmarks in biology, the theory of neuronal group selection, also known as Neural Darwinism from the title of Edelman's book and dubbed 'neural Edelmanism' by Francis Crick, has remained controversial and not well understood. Yet there are good reasons to believe that Neural Darwinism represents Edelman's most important legacy and that it will endure as a classic. When Neural Darwinism was published, the extent to which the brain is plastic was unclear. Today, demonstrations of plasticity fill neruoscience publications, vindicating Edelman's stance, and we now realize that almost any encounter with the environment during a waking day will strengthen many brain circuits."

PROVENANCE: MARSHALL WARREN NIERENBERG (1927 - 2010) shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" and describing how it operates in protein synthesis.Nirenberg's groundbreaking experiments advanced him to become the head of the Section of Biochemical Genetics in 1962 in the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), where he remained a laboratory chief until his death. Nirenberg provided the first step in deciphering the codons of the genetic code and the first demonstration of messenger RNA. Within a few years, his research team had performed similar experiments and found that three-base repeats of adenosine (AAA) produced the amino acid lysine, and cytosine repeats (CCC) produced proline.