The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004 Biological & Biomedical Essay

Name: ______________________________ ID#: ______________________________
(Linda B. Buck (29 January 1947 - )
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2004)
Short Biography
Linda B. Buck was born in 1947 in Seattle, Washington to a mother who was a homemaker and an enthusiast of word puzzles (Nobel Prize…c2019). Her father was an electric engineer who spent much of his time at home inventing stuff and building them in the family basement. Both her mother’s enthusiasm in puzzles and the father’s interest in inventions might have planted Buck’s seed for her future affinity for scientific discoveries, although she never imagined at any one time as a child that she would someday become a scientist. Nevertheless, her supportive parents often reminded her that she had an inherent ability to do anything she wanted in her life. The parents taught her to think autonomously and be critical in her own ideas and urged her to pursue something that could have a meaning in her life (Nobel Prize…c2019). Her mother reminded her that she should never settle for something mediocre and such sentiments became internalized to influence Buck’s work as a scientist.
Buck received Bachelor of Science in psychology and microbiology in 1975 from the University of Washington and her Ph.D. in immunology in 1980 at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas under Professor Ellen Vitetta’s direction (Nobel Prize…c2019). She always had the zeal to pursue a career in which she could be of help to others. These thoughts made her to initially major in psychology with a dream of becoming a psychotherapist. As time passed, her interests had expanded and she welcomed multiple career possibilities. Unfortunately, none of the careers was ideal for her and she was disinclined to embark on a career that would later prove to be inappropriate (Nobel Prize…c2019). Over the following several years, while traveling and living on a nearby island, she enrolled in more classes in Seattle and finally founder her path when she took a course in immunology. She found immunology subject fascinating and a strong feeling hit her that she would one day be a biologist.
Buck began her postdoctoral research in 1980 at Columbia University under the supervision of Dr. Benvenuto Permis between 1980 and 1982 (Nobel Prize…c2019). She would later join Dr. Richard Axel’s laboratory also located in Columbia in the Institute of Cancer Research. It is after she came across a research paper written by Sol Snyder’s group at Johns Hopkins University that Buck laid out the map of understanding the olfactory mechanism at molecular level to trace the journey of odors from the receptor cells of the nose through the brain. While working with rat genes together with Axel, she identified a family of genes encoding for over 1000 odor receptors and made a publication of their findings in 1991 (Nobel Prize…c2019). Before the end of that year, Buck was made an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in the department of Neurobiology where she later established her own laboratory.
Following her understanding on how the nose detects odors, Buck published her results in 1993 on how various inputs found in different odor receptors and structured in the nose. In general, Buck’s main research interest revolves around the detection of odors and pheromones by the nose and their interpretation in the brain (Nobel Prize…c2019). Currently, she serves at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a Full Member of the Basic Sciences Division and as an Affiliate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. Besides her 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine award, Buck’s other outstanding awards include the Takasogo Award (1992), Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award (1996) Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003), and ForMemRS (2015).
Major Scientific Achievements and Impacts
Linda Buck’s first major scientific discovery is when she solved the puzzle of the thousands of odorous chemicals and humans and other mammals can detect yet such chemicals appeared to be nearly identical to generate varied odor perceptions. She first figured out how the nose could detect such kinds of differing odors and embarked on searching for odor receptors for three years since 1988 (Nobel Prize…c2019). In her 1991 paper, Buck and Axel published the results of their findings where she pinpointed 1000 different types of olfactory receptors in mice, which are located in the olfactory epithelium in the back of the nose as shown in Figure 1 (Nobel Prize…c2019). These receptors are primarily protein molecules binding to molecules of certain odors, thus allowing for the detection of uniquely different scents. Although humans have relatively fewer of such receptors, about 350 against 1000 in mice, they virtually work under a similar mechanism.


(FIGURE 1 - Nasal lining as observed in a colored scanning electron micrograph. The olfactory cells (shown in red) are surrounded by numerous hair-like projections (cilia, shown in blue) (From “/womenwhochangedscience/stories/linda-buck”) retrieved 25 April 2019

Fig 1. Nasal lining as observed in a colored scanning electron micrograph. The olfactory cells (shown in red) are surrounded by numerous hair-like projections (cilia, shown in blue)
Upon solving the puzzle of how the olfactory system recognized odorants, Buck was headed to Harvard University to solve yet another quandary. At Harvard, she wanted to understand how the receptor signals created the impression of varying odors, predicated on their arrangements in the brain. She wondered how only 350 human olfactory receptors could distinguish among more than 10,000 different smells, bearing the fact that some of them are nearly identical (Nobel Prize…c2019). It took Buck until 1999 to find the answer to this puzzle. She discovered that humans had a complicated system whereby each of the olfactory receptor recognized more than a single odorant and each of the odorants known can be recognized by more than a single receptor. The receptors thus create a “combinatorial code” by working in unison forming an “odorant pattern” to detect specific odors. This code is the foundation of the ability of recognizing over 10,000 different types of odors in humans (Nobel Prize…c2019). This is a similar way humans can spell thousands of phrases using only 26 letters of the alphabet, A to Z, or the ability of the cellular machinery to synthesize different amino acids and genes using on four base letters, A, C, G, and T/U.
Buck later moved on to understand the mechanism of transforming odor reception into a perception and memory. In this pursuit, she wanted to understand the journey it takes the odor signals received in the nose from the time they are received to their processing in the olfactory cortex of the brain. At the age of 54 when she became a full professor at Harvard University, Buck published her 2001 paper about the mechanism of mapping olfactory neurons in the cortex (Nobel Prize…c2019). She first began her investigations about smell perception mechanism in the nose and moved into understanding the profound effects of smell on the brain. These effects derived from the smell include memory, attraction, emotion, and aversion. About one year after working on the effect of smell on memory, emotion, attraction, and aversion, and two years before she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine co-awarded with her colleague Alex, Buck moved back to Seattle. Here at Washington Seattle, Buck established her laboratory at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and dedicated the facility to her continued exploration of the olfactory system.
Biomedical research in olfaction had lagged behind vision studies in previous century. However, in the early 1990s, this area experienced two different phases of growth with Buck and Axel’s discovery of ORs in 1991 and the subsequent conclusion of the human genome sequence and other mammalian genomes (Keller and Vosshall 2008). The search for rec...