Smell study nets Americans Nobel
U.S. scientists first to explain how sense of smell works
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- U.S scientists Richard Axel and Linda Buck have won the 2004 Nobel prize for medicine for research explaining how the human sense of smell works.
"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 citation.
The prize, awarded by Sweden's Karolinska Institute, is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.38 million) -- but the international prestige it brings is seen as greater still.
"Until Axel and Buck's studies the sense of smell was a mystery," Prof. Sten Grillner, one of the Karolinska's panel of experts, told reporters.
They discovered a large gene family of "odorant receptors" helping to understand how humans "can consciously experience the smell of a lilac flower in the spring and recall this olfactory memory at other times," the citation said.
The Nobel assembly said the sense of smell "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."
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 Center in Seattle, Washington.
They reported the gene discoveries jointly in 1991 and have since worked independently shedding further light on the olfactory system.
Speaking on Swedish radio, Axel said he was honored by the award, adding he had never considered the possibility of winning it while doing his research.
"That's really marvelous," he said. "This is nothing I have been thinking about. I think about my science."
Fred Hutchinson Center spokeswoman Susan Edmonds told The Associated Press: "How wonderful! That's exciting."
There are no set guidelines for deciding who wins. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who endowed the awards that bear his name, simply said the winner "shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine."
The Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet, which selects the medicine prize winner, invites nominations from previous recipients, professors of medicine and other professionals worldwide before whittling down its choices in the fall.
Last year's prize winners were Briton Sir Peter Mansfield and American Paul C. Lauterbur for discoveries that led to the development of MRI, which is used by doctors to get a detailed look into their patients' bodies.
The award for medicine opens a week of Nobel Prizes that culminates Oct. 11 with the economics prize. The peace prize, the only one bestowed in Oslo, Norway, will be announced October 8. The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry prize will be announced Wednesday in the Swedish capital.
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.
The awards always are presented on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
