Kandel’s book is turning out to be quite inspirational for me. I will add here a couple of quotes that I want to remember later on.
When talking about his first set of experiments measuring neural actvity in cats at around the age of 27…
To my surprise, I found my first laboratory experiences to be absorbing, quite unlike the rather dry science I had been taught in college and medical school classrooms. In the laboratory, science is a means for formulating interesting questions about nature, discussing whether those questions are important and well formulated, and then designing a sseries of experiments to explore possible answers to a particular question.
It is becoming clear from the narration of his trajectory that much of his success in science was due to his effort to learn and interact from other experienced researchers in several areas related to his interest. For example, when talking about one of the many people that work as advisors to his ideas, he says:
Despite my obvious inexperience, he did not insist that I work only on problems that interested him. Rather, he allowed me to think about what I wanted to do – which was to study how learning and memory are achieved in the cells of the brain.
I’m trying to compile a list of all the people that advised him in some scientific way but there’s too many.. I’ll do it later. One thing is for sure, throughout the book he makes very clear “the importance of student-teacher relationship’s in one’s intellectual development.”
Eduardo J. Izquierdo 
I like your approach to your science and find it quite respectful. If we as scientists cannot find balance between our egos and the necessity to perform the work, then we can accomplish little. I am interested to hear how his philosophy has shaped your own research into ALife for I am trying to formulate the same thing; i.e., strike the balance between extremes of personality and endeavor.