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Medicine/Physiology Nobel Laureates Announced

Posted by timothy on from the hey-that-smells-good dept.

Seehund writes "Today, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the laureates of this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck are jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for their discoveries in the field of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system."

9 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Highly spiffy by sharky611aol.com · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It's about time. Every class I took as an undergrad in physiology and neuroscience always just glossed over olfaction. It's amazing how little we know about this sense compared to the other senses. We have a fairly complete understanding of the way sight (for instance, did you know that the visual cortex can perform on the fly Fourier analysis??), sound, and sensation (with the notable exception of pain) work, yet olfaction has always baffled us - mainly because we couldn't fathom of a system that would have thousands of different receptors that could each recognize a different smell (whoops!).

    Kudos to Drs. Axel and Buck.

    1. Re:Highly spiffy by biobogonics · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's about time. Every class I took as an undergrad in physiology and neuroscience always just glossed over olfaction. It's amazing how little we know about this sense compared to the other senses.

      Among brain functions, smell is one of the most primitive, so an understanding of smell helps us understand a variety of other organisms. Mapping receptors to genes may also give us insight into how other neural sensory systems work. Finally, there are close and very primitive relationships between smell and the old emotional parts of the brain (the limbic system) so this type of study may ultimately shed some light on emotional or mental disorders as well.

  2. Re:It's all great...... by leonara · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe its just a slump year!

    With all the research on going around us, one would have expected some new breakthrough in cures for some of the diseases that plague us. However, since there is only one broad category for medicine and physiology, chances are that new techniques to identify/cure diseases would always take precedence over research of this kind - which though not earth shattering, would have taken as much decidation and perseverance.

    And in the end "The judges decision is final"!

    --
    -- Off to build a bridge between the twin peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
  3. Stuyvesant rules! by JohnQPublic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Woo hoo! That makes 4 Nobel laureates for Stuyvesant HS! Axel is class of '63

  4. Axel and IP by theodicey · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is the same Richard Axel who has engaged in sleazy intellectual property practice with his cotransformation patents (basically, the process of randomly inserting a gene into organisms' DNA, and finding out which insertions have been successful).

    The Public Patent Foundation (which recently got Microsoft's FAT filesystem patent rejected) has gotten the patent office to agree to re-examine the most recent, presumably illegitimate Axel patents.

    Of course this work has almost nothing to do with the work for which he was awarded the Nobel prize...

    1. Re:Axel and IP by k98sven · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes it's the same Axel.

      No, it doesn't have much to do with what he's getting the prize.

      And I'm not certain these 'sleazly practices' necessarily have anything to do with him directly either.

      He got a patent for a valid discovery. (noone is questioning the original patent)

      Columbia made a lot of money off it. So much money that they apparently tried to re-patent the same discovery.

      I'd say it's more likely a greedy Columbia board of trustees than him personally.

      But anyway, it's still not very relevant.

  5. Olfaction is of central importance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting


    Olfaction is of central importance for most species

    All living organisms can detect and identify chemical substances in their environment. It is obviously of great survival value to be able to identify suitable food and to avoid putrid or unfit foodstuff. Whereas fish has a relatively small number of odorant receptors, about one hundred, mice - the species Axel and Buck studied - have about one thousand. Humans have a somewhat smaller number than mice; some of the genes have been lost during evolution.

    Smell is absolutely essential for a newborn mammalian pup to find the teats of its mother and obtain milk - without olfaction the pup does not survive unaided. Olfaction is also of paramount importance for many adult animals, since they observe and interpret their environment largely by sensing smell. For example, the area of the olfactory epithelium in dogs is some forty times larger than in humans.

  6. where's the predictive capacity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I notice noone has mentioned the 'shape' vs 'vibration' tussle in olfactory reception. The vibration theory seemed like a good bet to me because of its predictive powers, which the Nobel laureates' theory has always lacked.

  7. Re:It's all great...... by Cryect · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One thing to note is Nobel prizes in medicine are often awarded well after the original discovery. Second off, goto take a neurophysiology class and you will find out that since their paper, smell is one of the most completely understood systems of how it works. Its also often used as examples in showing how feedback, feedforward, and lateral inhibition work. Its really an important work in being able to understand how neurons interact and work better from the first neurons that get the signal to those that store the info in the brain.