Well, another year went by, and with sadness I must put my bottle of champagne back in the fridge (it’s well past its prime by now). According to CNN, the Karolinska Institut announced this morning that the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine went to three people: two Norwegians (a couple who works together) and an American working in England. Here they are:
It’s a sad state of affairs that I have neither heard of any of them nor of their discoveries, described by CNN as follows:
John O’Keefe, along with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, discovered cells that form a positioning system in the brain — our hard-wired GPS.
Those cells mark our position, navigate where we’re going and help us remember it all, so that we can repeat our trips, the Nobel Assembly said in a statement.
Their research could also prove useful in Alzheimer’s research, because of the parts of the brain those cells lie in — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex.
Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, which lie in the inner core of the bottom of the brain and are responsible for memory and orientation. The entorhinal cortices share these functions and connect the hippocampi with the huge neocortex, the bulk of our gray matter.
In Alzheimer’s patients, those two brain components break down early on, causing sufferers to get lost more easily. Understanding how the brain’s GPS works may help scientists in the future understand how this disorientation occurs.
The research is also important, because it pinpoints “a cellular basis for higher cognitive function,” the Nobel Assembly said.
The scientists conducted their research on rats, but other research on humans indicates that we have these same cells.
I’m not sure how overblown the Alzheimer’s implications are; perhaps a reader could tell us, or further describe the research. Remember that this prize, the only one explicitly designated for biology, is supposed to go for insights that improve human welfare. In practice that’s not always the case, as prizes have been given for fundamental breakthroughs in non-health-related work (viz. T. H. Morgan’s prize for genetic work in Drosophila or Axel and Buck’s 2004 prize for work on olfactory receptors), but one can always argue that such work has potential implications for humans, as Morgan’s indeed did.
The physics prize will be announced tomorrow, the chemistry prize Wednesday, the peace prize on Friday, and the economics “prize” (not really a Nobel Prize) will go to a University of Chicago Professor, as always, a week from today (Oct. 13). The prize for literature will be announced at an unspecified date.
Would anybody care to guess the recipients? If you get two out of the five, you’ll get an autographed copy of WEIT with a Nobel-winning cat (sporting the medal) drawn in it. You can guess all five if you wish. Deadline by today at 5 p.m., and one guess per customer. First correct answer wins. (p.s.: our panel of expert judges is looking at the “cat vs. dog breed” answers.)
Sub
We don’t know enough about Alzheimer’s to know if this will help. As it is the hippocampus is involved in memory, especially spatial memory, but that’s the only relation. The hippocampus is very easy to work with (it’s organized) so we know a lot about it. It’s probably true that memory and Alzheimer’s are related to many other parts of the brain.
Well that helps me to narrow down why I get turned around so easily.
Daniel Kahneman who won/shared the ‘not-really-Nobel for Economics’, is in fact a psychologist/human behaviouralist, AND at Princeton (now)! I would recommend reading him for anyone interested in human behaviour. He is engaging as a writer & insightful as to why we do some of the things we do.
I recently finished “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” and while I found it instructive, it was a hard slog: more akin to a textbook than a trade book. It seems to be one of those books that everyone buys but few read (a survey of highlighted passages in Kindle showed that). I’m glad I READ it, but I didn’t really enjoy reading it, as I found it rather dutiful.
I agree with Jerry about the Kahneman. I found it a bit of a slog as well as seeming kind of obvious. I read it about a year ago.
I read it too and it definitely wasn’t easy reading. But I got a lot out of it – more than any other book I have recently read. But I am a little surprised you found it kind of obvious.
It’s not as though I knew it all already, but maybe I just thought, oh, yeah, that is the case, about a lot of the points he made. The points themselves were not difficult, but I believe it could have been written in a more elegant style (like Jerry’s books – no, I’m not brown-noseing (nosing?) – or Brian Cox’s, or Richard D’s, or Feynman’s, par exemple).
Physics, Charles Kane. Chemistry, Svante Paabo. Peace, Pope Francis. Literature, Haruki Murakami. Economics, Hodge Podge (my cat).
Hodge Podge by being a cat is already noble; it does not need a prize. Let some poor Chicago economist have the Riksbank prize.
I didn’t want to cheat by googling and I could not think of a single economist aside form a few Austrian school who don’t have a prayer of winning, probably. So Hodge Podge (19-yr-old female tabby) it is!
You could be right about Kane. I have guessed most of the physics prizes (on average; not necessarily the same year, but eventually) for over a decade.
The medicine one sounds interesting, e.g. grid cells are worth reading about.
It seems Kane has a couple guys working with him, or on parallel lines at least: Zhang and Molenkamp. So I guess it would go to all three.
The prize for literature will be announced on Thursday (as it always is, I think). Murakami seems to be the big favourite there indeed.
I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that the unbroken streak of recipients being members of the Homo genus will continue. Better luck next year, Pan! Don’t give up!
b&
Ben, I will extend your prediction:
I predict that the unbroken streak of recipients being LIVING members of the Homo genus will continue.
Oooh…daring! I wish you the best of luck with that prediction!
b&
And that there will be no more than three recipients of any of the prizes!
This is good! I had hoped the prize would go to our own Svante Pääbo, but this is only the 4th or so couple rewarded. A real “Norway history”, as opposed to the jokes swedes tells about norwegians.
I have a vague memory of having read about this before, but I didn’t suspect it was Nobel Prize material. The local media portrays it as O’Keefe found the current and past location “position cells”, and then Moser & Moser a reference “GPS cells” grid AFAIU. Is that correct?
Physics: Everyone seems to think it will be topological insulators, so why not.
Charles Kane, Shouzeng Zhang, Laurens Molenkamp.
Chemistry: Rapid sequencing.
Eugene Myers, Craig Venter, Leroy Hood.
I have Paabo down for a chemistry prize, I wonder if that is even a possibility?
And stories Norwegians tell about Swedes:-)
Physics: I’m also going for topological insulators, but I pick Duncan Haldane, Charles Kane, and Shoucheng Zhang.
Chemistry: Stuart Schreiber for chemical biology and David Allis for histone modifications.
The “memory” work by The Mosers have been known and commented on for some years. Very interesting work and that text was not very informative.