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US Scientists Win 2004 Nobel Medicine Prize

Posted on: Tuesday, 5 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

US scientists win 2004 Nobel Medicine Prize

STOCKHOLM, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- US scientists Richard Axel and Linda Buck on Monday were awarded the 2004 Nobel prize for medicine for their gene studies that explain how the human sense of smell functions.

Sweden's Karolinska Institute said here that Axel and Buck share the 2004 Nobel Prize for medicine for their discoveries of " odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system" in human beings.

"The sense of smell long remained the most enigmatic of our senses. The basic principles for recognizing and remembering about 10,000 different odors were not understood," said the institute's Nobel Assembly in a press release.

The press release said Colombia University professor Axel, 58, and 57-year-old Buck, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, discovered genes that give rise to a huge variety of "receptor" proteins that sense particular odors.

"Until Axel and Buck's studies, the sense of smell was a mystery," Professor Sten Grillner, one of the Karolinska's panel of experts, told reporters.

The two scientists discovered a large gene family, three percent of total genes, that give rise to an equivalent number of "olfactory receptor types", or sensors.

Each receptor cell has only one type of odorant receptor and each receptor can detect a limited number of odorant substances.

Axel and Buck published their prime paper on the subject in 1991 and have since produced studies clarifying the olfactory system from the molecular level to the organization of the cells.

The award for medicine on Monday opens a week of Nobel Prize announcements culminating Oct. 11 with the economics prize. First given in 1901, each prize is worth 10 million Swedish crowns (1.38 million US dollars).

The peace prize will be announced Friday, the physics prize on Tuesday and the chemistry prize on Wednesday.

The prize for literature is likely to be announced on Thursday.

Formal awarding of the prizes always takes place at Stockholm's City Hall on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel.

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