Science of smell wins medicine Nobel

摘要

How would you react if you got that call from Stockholm? Linda Buck, a neuroscientist from Seattle, fumbled her phone in the dark and accidentally hung up. It was 2.30 in the morning, mind you. Co-winner Richard Axel, her former lab chief at Columbia University in New York, managed to take his call without mishap. The pair won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this week for their seminal work on olfaction — the sensory system concerned with smell. Smell is crucial to animals: they use it to recognize other animals, identify territories and seek out mates, for example. Humans rely on it rather less, but still benefit from being able to smell burning from a distance, for instance, or tell if meat has gone bad.