Born in Newark, New Jersey on 26 March 1941, Edell's father was a vitamin manufacturer in the 1940s and 50s. Edell studied zoology at Cornell University and earned his M.D. from Cornell University Medical School in 1967. Edell later opened a private ophthalmology practice in San Diego, California and acted as an instructor of Anatomy and a clinical instructor at the University of California, San Diego. Edell soon quit medical practice altogether in 1973. He later said that he "... didn't like medicine originally...I kind of found the thing I love the most, which is really the information and communicating the information".