Linda Buck
- Born
- 29 January 1947
Linda Buck has won the Nobel Prize, along with Richard Axel, for their discoveries concerning the olfactory system.
Buck studied at the University of Washington, majoring in Psychology, and she initially planned to become a psychotherapist. However, after university she travelled, lived on a nearby island and took more classes in Seattle. She found that she really enjoyed studying immunology, and aspired to become a biologist.
In 1975, she joined the graduate school in the Microbiology department at the University of Texas Medical Centre, which was the centre of immunology in America. It was here that Buck says that she truly learnt to become a scientist.
In 1980 she moved to Columbia University in New York City to undertake postdoctoral work in immunology with Buenvenuto Pernis. Buck focussed on the class II MHC proteins found on the surface of B lymphocytes.
Around 1986, Buck read a paper that changed her life. This paper discussed the potential mechanisms underlying odour detection. She embarked on a mission to discover the odorant receptors, a class of odour detecting molecules whose existence had been suggested, but which had never been found. She began odorant receptor research in 1988, and in three years later, she and Richard Axel published their work on the identification of odorant receptors.
In 2002 Buck returned to Seattle to join the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She also became Affiliate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. She continued her research into odour detection and explored the means by which pheromones elicit instinctive behaviours.
She has since become interested in the neural circuits that initiate behaviours and basic drives, such as fear, appetite and reproduction. Buck and her team are currently developing molecular techniques to uncover those circuits and discover the neurons present and the genes that they express.
In 2004, Linda Buck and Richard Axel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the olfactory system.