Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    That really stinks.

    (It's a JOKE, not flamebait.)

  2. 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.

  3. Re:It's all great...... by ktulus+cry · · Score: 5, Informative
    The original paper wasn't just a foundation for the discovery of thousands of beforehand unknown olfactory receptors, it was a founding paper in the searching of multi-gene families.

    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.

  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...

  5. Olfaction and memory by f00zy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.