The Nobel prize in Physiology & Medicine 2004

Working in the field of Neuroscience and not commenting on this year's Noble Laureates would be heresy. I will not be covering their Nobel prize in the same way as popular press, ie. CNN or BBC. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about what I found out about the background behind their Nobel.

Linda Buck and Richard Axel recieved their Nobel prize for their work on olfaction - the sense of smell. I got curious about where they stood in the overall field of olfaction. The original paper which discovered the genes for Olfactory receptors came from their work. That original paper was published in the journal 'Cell':

A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognition
Linda Buck and Richard Axel
Cell, Vol 65, 175-187, 5 April 1991

There was an account from Linda Buck somewhere in popular press about how hard those original genes were to clone and identify. I can fully understand why, in the 1990's cloning a family of genes was still a heroic task, much unlike the routine task it has become in today's genome age. If you go back and look at her publication record during that period, there's a paper in 1987 followed by a 4 year lull, after which is the now famous paper in Cell. 4-years is a really long time in research to work on one project. If you look at Linda Buck's publications in recent years, she's really prolific, again restating how hard that original set of experiments must have been. Both of them in the years since have worked extensively in the field of olfaction, making many exciting discoveries about how olfaction works.

I guess anyone in Science wishes that at some point in their career, they make this fundamental discovery that opens up new areas of research, I know I do. There is some irony in all of this though. A lot is known about the patterns in which olfactory receptors are expressed and the wiring up of these receptors to the rest of the brain. There is some understanding of how olfactory signals or smell is processed in the brain, but surprisingly people still dont understand how olfactory receptors sense/recognize odours.