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Science News

Medicine/Physiology Nobel Laureates Announced 76

Posted by timothy 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."
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Medicine/Physiology Nobel Laureates Announced More

Medicine/Physiology Nobel Laureates Announced

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  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:14PM (#10435636)
    That really stinks.

    (It's a JOKE, not flamebait.)

    • They get a lot of dollars... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For studying scents.

      It was close, though - they won by a nose.
      • Well, it makes scents to me. sniff.
      • ... without reading the article:

        The olfactory system is one of the phylogenetically oldest brain regions and has interconnections to lots of other systems.

        Think of relationships: The smell of the person you are talking to influences your behaviour and your view of this person.

        Think about other behaviour: McDonald's wouldn't be so famous if their food wouldn't be so tasty. Perfumes are a big market.

        Think about mind control: If you get someone to do what you want by manipulating his/her olfactory syst
    • Seems fishy to me!

  • Obligitory... (Score:3, Funny)

    by wviperw ( 706068 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:16PM (#10435657) Homepage Journal
    Yeah, I remember reading that paper... it stunk.

    Ba Dum Cha!

    I'll be here all week folks. Try the fish!

  • Nice News... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Elracim ( 660617 )
    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.
  • about quality of life stuff, don't get me wrong, but this is hardly the cure for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. Are you telling me there were no more qualified applicants than this? People working on life stuff, not "just" quality of life?

    • Re:It's all great...... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by leonara ( 87228 )
      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"!

    • Re:It's all great...... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ktulus cry ( 607800 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:30PM (#10435763)
      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.

      • Damned good work (Score:5, Informative)

        by siskbc ( 598067 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:21PM (#10436295) Homepage
        Thanks for saying that. I work on artifical olfaction, and our research group has collaborated with Linda Buck's group. Having done so, I can say that her work is in fact groundbreaking. Smell is the least complicated, and evolutionarily oldest of all the senses. This alone makes it worth investigating, simply because of the insights it can give us on human perception.

        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.

      • Re:It's all great...... (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Man, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those receptors?
    • about quality of life stuff, don't get me wrong, but this is hardly the cure for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. Are you telling me there were no more qualified applicants than this? People working on life stuff, not "just" quality of life?

      Because we don't have a cure for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. I don't think they've even given out a Nobel for the discovery of transcription factors, yet.
    • 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 the

    • Re:It's all great...... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cryect ( 603197 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @11:58PM (#10436462)
      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.

    • Animals do better than machines right now on odor identification problems -- that's why dogs are pressed into action as sniffing machines for all sorts of compounds (including, as proof of concept, compounds that identify growing cancers).

      But its a hassle to use a dog, and it limits how olfaction can be used to solve clinical problems. If understanding the DNA of smell leads to inexpensive sensors that work as well as a dog, then we can look back and say this Nobel was for "life stuff" too.

  • "...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.
  • field of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system

    The flatus odor judge [64.233.161.104] could have used some insight!

  • Highly spiffy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sharky611aol.com ( 682311 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:27PM (#10435740)
    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.

    • Re:Highly spiffy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by biobogonics ( 513416 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:44PM (#10435839)
      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.

      Among brain functions, smell is one of the most primitive, so an understanding of smell helps us understand a variety of other organisms. Mapping receptors to genes may also give us insight into how other neural sensory systems work. Finally, there are close and very primitive relationships between smell and the old emotional parts of the brain (the limbic system) so this type of study may ultimately shed some light on emotional or mental disorders as well.

    • Re:Highly spiffy (Score:2, Informative)

      by amcox ( 588540 )
      Actually, while other animals have more, humans only have about 350 different receptors. The key to our ability to smell so many distinct scents is that each odorant will activate more then one kind of recpetor. Thus, olfaction is not, "oh, this receptor lit up, so it's this smell," but rather, "these receptors lit up, and combined they produce this smell."

    • Re:Highly spiffy (Score:3, Informative)

      by mangu ( 126918 )
      the visual cortex can perform on the fly Fourier analysis


      So can the ear. And a guitar string. And a grass field in the wind. Actually, it was the other way round. Mathematicians (well, Jean Baptiste Fourier, one French mathematician) invented the Fourier analysis in order to understand how complex signals can be separated into different frequencies by simple natural systems.

    • Hmmm curious when did you take your classes? If it was before the '90s I can understand, if not consider complaining since this paper came out in '91 and I have to say in couple of my undergrad classes we covered this material quite well. Also, on the visual cortex items a lot of what we know is stuff that seems to be pretty obvious once you look at the experiments due to it practically being so pictorial so often (ex. being you can see the actual patterns of what a chimp is looking at with radioactive dye

      • And I will just say the idea of a system that would have thousands of receptors for different smells that combine in combinatorial ways to generate all of our smells isn't that unfathomable when you consider how the immune system works (antibodies being the first real understanding of how with an extremely limited of amount of DNA can produce some many different possible combinations through splicing).

        I think one of Dr. Buck's contributions was the idea that it's not one olfactory receptor gene that gets mu

  • Is that some new gimmick from Old Spice? "Here young man, carry this 'odorant detector' with you so that you know when you need to swipe on some more of our classic deodorant goodness to keep the honeys happy."

  • Stuyvesant rules! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JohnQPublic ( 158027 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:34PM (#10435786)
    Woo hoo! That makes 4 Nobel laureates for Stuyvesant HS [stuy.edu]! Axel is class of '63

  • Axel and IP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theodicey ( 662941 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:34PM (#10435789)
    This is the same Richard Axel who has engaged in sleazy intellectual property practice [biomedcentral.com] 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 [pubpat.org] 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 had no idea that something that friggin' obvious had made so much money. It is akin to being able to collect royalties every time someone sorts a list because you were the first one to implement a bubble sort in COBOL - and of course file it with the patent office.

      But then again why should I be surprised...
      • Well the basic idea is obvious, the actual way its done is not obvious and thats the part that took likely years of research and is patented.
        • From the wording in the article, the patent is not a narrow one just for transformation of CHO cells by CaPO4 precipitation using methotextrate selection but for any protein expression from cotransformation of any eukaryotic cell. IANAL and if it is just for the CHO system in question then my objections (but not surprise) are greatly reduced.

          Anyway, this really is not the place for this thread - since none of this is relevant to the olfactory work that won him the prize.

    • Re:Axel and IP (Score:5, Interesting)

      by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:05PM (#10435954) Journal
      Yes it's the same Axel.

      No, it doesn't have much to do with what he's getting the prize.

      And I'm not certain these 'sleazly practices' necessarily have anything to do with him directly either.

      He got a patent for a valid discovery. (noone is questioning the original patent)

      Columbia made a lot of money off it. So much money that they apparently tried to re-patent the same discovery.

      I'd say it's more likely a greedy Columbia board of trustees than him personally.

      But anyway, it's still not very relevant.

      • Yes, Columbia tried to re-patent the original discovery; they were the assignee of all the cotransformation patents.

        But guess who was the inventor listed on the new patents, and who received royalties for every license granted? And who signed off on the application?

        • But guess who was the inventor listed on the new patents, and who received royalties for every license granted? And who signed off on the application?

          Well, given that it was an extension-type patent, he'd pretty much have to.

          Point is, there is quite a bit of pressure from universities to get their staff to patent whatever they can.

          The question is, would he have tried to file this extension patent on his own without pressure from his employer. Sure, maybe he's a greedy S.O.B. .. but it's also quite possi

  • Olfaction is of central importance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @09:58PM (#10435916)

    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.

  • Olfaction and memory (Score:5, Informative)

    by f00zy ( 783212 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @10:19PM (#10436016)
    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.
  • As one planning to study neuroscience at the PhD level, this is good to hear. It's a huge field, so lots of people are needed!

  • Buck (Score:2)

    by chuckw ( 15728 ) *
    Whooboy, had to look at that Buck name twice there.

    Welcome to tongue-wag-theatre! Go ahead ya self-rightous bastahd, I got plenty of karma to burn...

  • Obligatory Futurama Quote (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Professor: Eat it, everyone who's never won a Nobel Prize! And that includes you, Amy!
    Amy: (sobs)

    -- A No-Account Drifter

  • where's the predictive capacity? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I notice noone has mentioned the 'shape' vs 'vibration' tussle in olfactory reception. The vibration theory seemed like a good bet to me because of its predictive powers, which the Nobel laureates' theory has always lacked.
  • They called up the winnder of the nobel price in medecine on the swedish radio yesterday.

    He was suprised that they called and he seemed surprised that anyone knew of him, let alone his phone number.

    When asked how he was gonna celebrate he was quiet for a little while, then stated: Well...I'm going to have a cup of coffee I think.
  • Maybe they should team up with these other award winning researchers [zoology.ubc.ca].
  • Axel, et al are firmly in the predominant "Shape" theory camp regarding smell. There is also a small but resilient camp that wonder why certain substances (e.g hydrogen cynanide and bitter almonds) smell very similar but have no common molecular structure. There is no doubt that the huge genetic pool discovered by Axel produce a large variety of receptors that do *something*, and thanks to their work the pathways to the brain are now known, but exactly *what* is being detected is not well understood.

    Luca [flexitral.com]

    • Recent double-blind experiments in March '04 put doubt on this theory, but had no absolute proof of the "shape" theory either.

      To quote:

      "We didn't disprove the vibration theory. We just didn't find anything to support it," says assistant professor Leslie B. Vosshall, Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. "All of our data are consistent with the shape theory, but don't prove the shape theory."

      However several recent studies support the vibrational theory through differentiation of

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