2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine

Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Scientists for Discovering Brain's 'GPS'

 

The 1962 Nobel Prize gold medal awarded to Dr. Francis Crick for his work in the discovery of the structure of DNA will be offered by his family in a public auction conducted by Heritage Auctions in New York City on April 10 with a portion of proceeds to benefit scientific research at The Francis Crick Institute, scheduled to open in London in 2015.

A trio of scientists has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work related to nerve cells that create spatial maps in the brain to help us navigate through our environments.

Half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to John O'Keefe, and the other half goes jointly to May-Britt Moser and her husband Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain," according to an announcement by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm today (Oct. 6).

In 1971, O'Keefe discovered the first component of the brain's "inner GPS" through experiments in rats. He found that a nerve cell, called a place cell, in the hippocampus became active when a rat was in a certain place, while other "place" nerve cells turned on when the rodent moved to other places. He realized these cells were building maps inside the brain's hippocampus of various places in the rat's environment.

Then in 2005, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser discovered so-called grid cells, or a type of nerve cell that help generate a coordinating system for navigation in a brain region near the hippocampus called the entorhinal cortex.

"Their subsequent research showed how place and grid cells make it possible to determine position and to navigate," according to a Nobel Foundation statement.

More recent work has found that place cells and grid cells are also in the human brain, and they may be involved in some types of memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease.

O'Keefe, who was born in New York City, is currently the director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Center in Neural Circuits and Behavior at the University College London. The Mosers were both born in Norway. May-Britt is currently director of the Center for Neural Computation in Trondheim in Norway, while Edvard is the director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim.

O'Keefe will receive half of this year's Nobel Prize amount of 8 million Swedish Krona (about $1.1 million), and the Mosers will share the other half of the money.

 

 

All three scientists awarded the prize have dramatically changed how we understand the brain’s navigation and memory systems. John O’Keefe made a remarkable discovery in 1971 when he found ‘place cells’ in a brain region called the hippocampus, which provide an organised map of space in their activity patterns.

O’Keefe speculated that place cells would need information akin to latitude and longitude in order to map space. Where this signal was located remained mysterious until 2005 when May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered ‘grid cells’ in a brain region known as the medial entorhinal cortex. These cells show hexagonal patterns of activity stretching over the space traversed, similar to the lines that mark out distances on a globe.

 Grid cells and place cells offer one of the few bridges neuroscientists have linking the cellular level to the cognitive level, as they help explain how individual brain cells help us navigate, remember the past and imagine the future. The IgNobel prizewinning discovery that the hippocampus of London taxi drivers grows larger with experience would have likely been missed without such fundamental discoveries