Smelly Medicine Nobel in 2004
Medicine Nobel Awarded for Elucidating Sense of Smell: “The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded yesterday to two American researchers, Linda B. Buck of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Richard Axel of Columbia University. The scientists were honored for their work on unraveling the sense of smell.
For years, the principles governing the olfactory system eluded explanation. Then, in 1991, Buck and Axel published a seminal paper describing a family of about a thousand genes in mice (that is, a whopping 3 percent of the total gene count) for odorant receptors that detect inhaled odorant molecules. Humans have a comparable number of these receptors, which make up a subset of the so-called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR). “
