Born January 29, 1947 in Seattle, Washington, Linda B. Buck is an American scientist and co-recipient, along with Richard Axel, of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to the olfactory system.
Buck received a bachelor’s degree (1975) in microbiology and psychology from the University of Washington and a doctorate (1980) in immunology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She first worked with Axel in the early 1980s at Columbia University in New York City, where Axel was a professor and she was his postdoctoral student. Buck He held various positions at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Harvard Medical School from 1984 to 2002, when he joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
In 1991, Buck and Axel jointly published a landmark scientific paper, based on research they had conducted with laboratory rats, that detailed their discovery of the family of 1,000 genes that encode or produce an equivalent number of olfactory receptors. These receptors are proteins responsible for detecting odorous molecules in the air and are found on olfactory receptor cells, which are clustered in a small area at the back of the nasal cavity. Both scientists then clarified how the olfactory system works by showing that each receptor cell has only one type of odor receptor, which is specialized to recognize some odors. After the odor molecules bind to the receptors, the receptor cells send electrical signals to the olfactory bulb of the brain. The brain combines information from various types of receptors in specific patterns, which are experienced as distinct smells.
Axel and Buck later determined that most of the details they discovered about the sense of smell are virtually identical in rats, humans, and other animals, although they found that humans only have around 350 types of functioning olfactory receptors, about a third of the number in rats However, the genes that code for olfactory receptors in humans account for about 3 percent of all human genes. The work helped fuel scientific interest in the possible existence of human pheromones, odorous molecules known to trigger sexual activity and other behaviors in many animals, and the HHMI laboratory of Buck conducted research on how odor perceptions translate into emotional responses and instinctual behavior.