The Austrian-born American Nobel Prize laureate Eric Kandel has said in an interview that his country of origin still had a long way to go in facing up to its Nazi past. Whereas Germany had examined the Hitler era and formed a democracy in a fashion marked by "integrity and openness", in Austria there was no sign of any such transparency. Kandel, 80, said he dreamed of young Jewish scientists who came to Vienna again, and wished for the reconstruction of a Jewish society in the Austrian capital.

Kandel won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 2000. He was honored along with Arvid Carlsson of Sweden and Paul Greengard of the United States. All three received the prize for their research of the brain and central nervous system. Kandel made key discoveries about the mechanisms governing memory.
He was the second Austrian-born Jewish Nobel Prize laureate in two years.

As a child he was forced to flee his home country by the Nazis and went on to an illustrious career in the United States. In 1998 Walter Kohn, who fled Austria as a teenager in 1939 and whose parents died in Nazi death camps, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.