Sweet smell of Nobel success
Americans Richard Axel and Linda Buck have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine today for their work in studying odorant receptors and the organisation of the olfactory system in human beings.
The medicine prize includes a cheque for £725,000 (€1,051,842), but it is the aura of prestige a Nobel Prize confers that candidates crave most.
Axel, 58, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University in New York, shared the prize with Buck, 57, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, Washington.
According to the foundation, the pair were honoured because their work “discovered a large gene family, comprised of some 1,000 different genes (3% of our genes) that give rise to an equivalent number of olfactory receptor types.”
Those receptors help people determine what they are smelling, the foundation said.
Last year’s prize winners were Briton Sir Peter Mansfield and American Paul Lauterbur for discoveries that led to the development of MRI, which is used by doctors to get a detailed look into their patients’ bodies.
