Columbia Researcher Awarded Nobel Prize
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A Columbia University professor and his former colleague were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine yesterday in recognition of their groundbreaking research into our sense of smell.
The prize committee credited Richard Axel, a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center, and Linda Buck, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, with unraveling the mystery of our olfactory system by figuring out how humans detect and remember odors.
Their groundbreaking research into the olfactory system dates back to 1991, when Dr. Axel, 58, and Ms. Buck, 57, who at the time was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia, stunned the scientific world with their discovery of a huge family of genes devoted to the sense of smell. Those genes, which number in the hundreds, are responsible for the roughly equal number of olfactory receptors that allow the human body to recognize and remember thousands of different odors.
Before the Columbia researchers’ discovery, scientists had little idea of how humans can distinguish between the smell of, for example, an apple pie and a pizza pie. The Axel-Buck discovery is said to have given scientists insight into the highest levels of brain function, pointing a way toward understanding how sensory input influences behavior.
Dr. Axel and Ms. Buck, who split the $1.4 million award, are among 72 Nobel Prize winners who have a connection to Columbia University.
Speaking via a satellite feed from San Francisco, Dr. Axel said he felt “an intense joy and honor” at receiving the award. He was awakened at 4 a.m. with the news by a call from Swedish public radio.
“This is truly a great day for Columbia,” the university’s president, Lee Bollinger, said at a press conference yesterday. Mr. Bollinger said he hasn’t “met anyone who has higher standards for himself or for others” than Dr. Axel has. Mr. Bollinger described Dr. Axel as a faculty member with “enormous personal loyalty and personal warmth.”
The executive vice president for research at Columbia, David Hirsh, called Dr. Axel ” a true scholar,” who has “the remarkable ability” of homing in on unanswered and fundamental scientific questions. Dr. Hirsh was chairman of the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics when Dr. Axel and Ms. Buck made their first groundbreaking discovery 13 years ago.
“He is somebody we all go to for clarity of thought even about our own work,” Dr. Hirsh said. “He thinks so rigorously, so clearly about solving problems.”
Dr. Axel, who graduated from Columbia College in 1967, has been a researcher at the university since 1978 and lives near the school. He said he “wouldn’t work in a city other than New York.”
His main discovery with Dr. Buck was the hundreds of genes devoted to coding different odor receptors. Scientists were astonished by the sheer number of genes, which comprised 3% of the human genome. Only three genes, by comparison, are involved with the detection of different colors.
The olfactory detectors are located on the receptors on the membrane of the olfactory receptor cells. Odors activate the detectors, which trigger a signal in the cells that are sent to the brain. Dr. Axel and Ms. Buck later discovered that the cells react to more than one type of odor molecule, forming the basis for the brain’s ability to distinguish about 10,000 odors.
While they initially discovered 1,000 odor detector genes, they later realized that only about 350 are functional – a number significantly smaller than the number of working odor detector genes in rats. Dr. Axel attributed the difference to the decreasing importance of the sense of smell for humans through evolution.
After their initial discovery of the genes and receptors, Dr. Axel said that he and Ms. Buck, working independently, have focused their research on how different odors elicit different patterns of neural activity, and how the brain reads these patterns. Such research goes to the heart of understanding how the brain sorts information.
“We know relatively little” about how the brain works, Dr. Axel said, “despite the progress that has been made.”
More recently, Dr. Axel has been working on coming up with a nonpoisonous mosquito repellent that will remove the insect’s ability to sense the presence of a human. Columbia has applied for a patent on such a repellent, he said.