UNLOCKING the secrets of smell earned two Americans this year’s Nobel prize for medicine or physiology. Richard Axel and Linda Buck will share $1.3 million for discovering the family of 1000 genes that code for the odour receptors in our noses and working out how the signals from these receptors are translated into recognisable smells by the brain.
They published their main findings jointly in 1991. Since then, they have worked independently to piece together the rest of the jigsaw, showing for instance that each odour receptor cell has just one type of receptor, although each receptor can detect several…
