US researchers Richard Axel and Linda Buck were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine yesterday for their efforts to better understand, and explain, how people can smell a lilac flower on a spring morning and still recall it years later.
In its decision to honor the pair, the Nobel foundation said that the human sense of smell is what "helps us detect the qualities we regard as positive. A good wine or a sun ripe wild strawberry activates a whole array of odorant receptors."
The work by Axel, 58, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University in New York, and Buck, 57, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, discovered a family of about 1,000 genes that give rise to a huge variety of proteins that sense particular smells.
These proteins are found are found in cells in the nose which communicate with the brain.
"Therefore, we can consciously experience the smell of a lilac flower in the spring and recall this olfactory memory at other times," the foundation said.
Axel is professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of pathology at Columbia University, and he specializes in how sensory information is received, filtered and understood by the brain.
Buck, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, has specialized in how mammals detect and differentiate odors and pheromones and how the brain translates and perceives them.
The medicine prize includes a check for 10 million kronor (US$1.3 million).
The award for medicine opens a week of Nobel Prizes that culminates Oct. 11 with the economics prize. The physics award will be announced today and the chemistry prize will be announced tomorrow.
The peace prize, the only one bestowed in Oslo, Norway, will be announced on Friday.
A date for the Nobel Prize in literature has not yet been set by the Swedish Academy, but is likely to fall on Thursday, Nobel watchers said.
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