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Medicine/Physiology Nobel Laureates Announced
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."
That really stinks.
(It's a JOKE, not flamebait.)
Yeah, I remember reading that paper... it stunk.
Ba Dum Cha!
I'll be here all week folks. Try the fish!
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
For studying scents.
It was close, though - they won by a nose.
I saw this and thought: Aren't there enough bad jokes on slashdot already? Do the editors go out of their way to put these stories up? I can't think of a single thing to say that doesn't involve some bad pun or reference to flatulence... and I'm sure I'm not alone.
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"...awarded the Nobel Prize for their discoveries in the field of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system."
I wonder if it explains why your own farts don't smell as bad as others.
Unknown host pong.
Kudos to Drs. Axel and Buck.
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.
Here comes some science: it was accepted/assumed that all these receptors were transmembrane g-protein coupled receptors. Without getting into that, they all span the cell membrane with 7 hydrophobic transmembrane domains. These are all well conserved among the receptors, and a couple of them are VERY conserved. They designed a whole bunch of PCR primers based on these regions of similarity and mixed pairs of them together to see what happened.
One pair light up a genome PCR like mad. It was very very clear that a whole gene family existed that shared homology to the very few known odorant receptors.
So while it is true that you might not think that smell is a huge deal (the mechanics are rather mind-boggling, and scienctists don't like not understanding things), they have paved the way for that as well as provided a hugely referenced technique for scanning genomes for multi-gene families. That in itself is worthy of at least a nomination.
Woo hoo! That makes 4 Nobel laureates for Stuyvesant HS! Axel is class of '63
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...
I thought that at first, too, but it turns out there are plenty of practical things here. First, it gives some pretty interesting insight in how the brain processes smell. Beyond the knowledge of brain function, which could be useful in other arenas, it's also possible to use this to create an "artifical nose", which could be used to sniff out bombs or, and I know this sounds loopy, but it's true, to detect disease. There are already mice trained to sniff out cancer in litter-mates, so if we knew HOW they did it, then we could create something to do it for humans.
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.
Kidding aside, this is interesting and worthy of praise. Olfaction is deeply intertwined with memory and an important part of general living. They have mapped genes involved in the process and identified a seemingly tree-like messaging hierarchy where messages can meet and interact to produce unique smells/thoughts/ideas in differnt parts of the brain.
Work that Linda's group, in conjunction with our group and a number of others, has brought us closer to understanding how odor works on a molecular level, to how odor is perceived, to how we can model this using artificial equipment.
Ultimately, she is well deserving of the Prize.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Professor: Eat it, everyone who's never won a Nobel Prize! And that includes you, Amy!
Amy: (sobs)
-- A No-Account Drifter
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.
Luca Turin is the current proponent of the theory that olfaction is at least influenced not only by molecular shape, but also by the vibrational modes and spectra of the molecule. Recent double-blind experiments in March '04 put doubt on this theory, but had no absolute proof of the "shape" theory either. Clouding the whole scientific controversy is the cult-following Turing has acquired following the publication of Chandler Burr's book about Turin, "The Emperor of Scent".
You can find discussions of this and other theories of smell here.