British-American researcher John O’Keefe yesterday won the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Norwegian couple Edvard and May-Britt Moser for discovering how the brain navigates.
The trio earned the coveted prize for discovering a positioning system — an “inner GPS” — which enables us to orient ourselves in space, the jury said.
The research has implications for Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, it said.
Photo: AFP
“The discoveries of John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries: How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?” the jury said.
In 1971, O’Keefe discovered the first component of the system, finding that in lab rats, specific cells in the hippocampus were triggered when the animal was at a certain location in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rat was in other places, leading O’Keefe to conclude that these “place cells” formed a map of the room.
More than three decades later, in 2005, May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered another piece of the invisible positioning system.
Photo: EPA
They identified “grid cells,” nerve cells which generate a coordinated system, rather like longitude and latitude, and allow the brain to make precise positioning and pathfinding.
Research into grid cells may give insights into how memories are created and explain why when a person recalls events, they so often have to picture the location.
May-Britt Moser told the Nobel Foundation that she was “in shock” and that her husband did not even know yet as he was on a plane to Munich.
“We have the same vision, we love to understand and we do that by talking to each other, talking to other people and then try to address the questions we are interested in, the best way we can think of,” she said.
The jury said the work had led to a “paradigm shift” in understanding how groups of specialized cells work together in the brain.
In a comment, Andrew King, a professor of neurophysiology at Britain’s Oxford University, said O’Keefe had “revolutionized our understanding.”
“This work and that of May-Britt and Edvard Moser also highlights the importance of electrophysiological studies in animals for revealing major insights into how the brain works,” he said.
The winners will share the prize sum of 8 million Swedish kronor (US$1.1 million), with one half going to O’Keefe.
The laureates are to receive their prize at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
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