Linda B. Buck

Linda Buck

Linda Buck attending 2004 Golden Plate Award event
Born Linda Brown Buck
(1947-01-29) January 29, 1947[1]
Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Nationality American
Fields Biologist
Institutions Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
University of Washington, Seattle
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Columbia University
Harvard University[2]
Alma mater
Known for Olfactory receptors
Notable awards
Spouse Roger Brent
Website
www.hhmi.org/scientists/linda-b-buck

Linda Brown Buck (born January 29, 1947) is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system.[1] She was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard Axel, for their work on olfactory receptors.[5][6][7][8] She is currently on the faculty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.[9]

Personal life

Linda B. Buck was born in Seattle, Washington on January 29, 1947. Her father was an electrical engineer who spent his time inventing and building different items in his spare time, while her mother was a homemaker who spent a majority of her free time solving word puzzles.[10] Buck was the second of three children, all of them being girls.[11] Buck's parents raised them to believe that they had the ability to do anything they wanted with their lives and she attributes her affinity of science to her parents interest and dedication she grew up around.[11] In 1994 Buck met Roger Brent, a biologist also. The two married in 2006.[12]

Education

Buck received her B.S. in psychology and microbiology in 1975 from the University of Washington, Seattle and her Ph.D. in immunology in 1980 under the direction of Professor Ellen Vitetta at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.[13]

Career and research

In 1980, Buck began postdoctoral research at Columbia University under Dr. Benvenuto Pernis (1980-1982). In 1982, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Richard Axel, also at Columbia in the Institute of Cancer Research. In 1984, Dr. Axel became a Howard Hughes Investigator. After reading Sol Snyder's group research paper at Johns Hopkins University, Linda Buck set out to map the olfactory process at the molecular level, tracing the travel of odors through the cells of the nose to the brain. Buck and Axel worked with rat genes in their research and identified a family of genes that code for more than 1000 odor receptors and published these findings in 1991.[6][14] Later that year, Buck became an assistant professor in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School where she expanded her knowledge of the nervous system and established her own lab.[15] After finding how odors are detected by the nose, Buck published her findings in 1993 on how the inputs from different odor receptors are organized in the nose.[14] Essentially, her primary research interest is on how pheromones and odors are detected in the nose and interpreted in the brain. She is a Full Member of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, an Affiliate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington, Seattle and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2004)

In her landmark paper published in 1991 with Richard Axel, Linda Buck discovered hundreds of genes code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory neurons of our noses.[13] Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odor attaches to the receptor, causing an electrical signal to be sent to the brain.[11] Differences between odorant sensors mean that certain odors cause a signal to be released from a certain receptor.[11] We are then able to interpret varying signals from our receptors as specific scents.[11] To do this, Buck and Axel cloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family of G protein-coupled receptors. By analyzing rat DNA, they estimated that there were approximately one thousand different genes for olfactory receptors in the mammalian genome. This research opened the door to the genetic and molecular analysis of the mechanisms of olfaction. In their later work, Buck and Axel have shown that each olfactory receptor neuron remarkably only expresses one kind of olfactory receptor protein and that the input from all neurons expressing the same receptor is collected by a single dedicated glomerulus of the olfactory bulb.

Awards and honors

Linda Buck in 2015, portrait via the Royal Society

Buck was awarded the Takasago Award for Research in Olfaction (1992), Unilever Science Award (1996), R.H. Wright Award in Olfactory Research (1996), Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (1997), Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2003), and Gairdner Foundation International Award (2003).[16] Buck was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and the Institutes of Medicine in 2006.[16] Buck is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008.[17] She also sits on the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize. In 2015, Buck was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard University and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS).[4]

References

  1. 1 2 BUCK, Linda B. ukwhoswho.com. Who's Who. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  2. ↑ "Facts & Figures". Harvard Medical School. Harvard College. Retrieved 7 November 2012.
  3. ↑ "Linda B. Buck - A Superstar of Science". Superstars of Science. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  4. 1 2 "Dr Linda Buck ForMemRS, Foreign Member". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  5. ↑ "Press Release: The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 8 November 2012.
  6. 1 2 Buck L., Axel R. A novel multigene family may encode odorant receptors: a molecular basis for odor recognition. Cell 1991;65:175-87. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(91)90418-X PMID 1840504.
  7. ↑ "Secrets of smell land Nobel Prize". BBC News. 4 October 2004. Retrieved 8 November 2012.
  8. ↑ "Linda B. Buck - Curriculum Vitae, Interview". 2013-01-12. Archived from the original on January 12, 2013. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  9. ↑ "Linda Buck Lab". Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  10. ↑ "Linda B. Buck, PhD". HHMI.org. Retrieved 2016-04-04.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 "Linda B. Buck - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. The Nobel Foundation 2004. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  12. ↑ Badge, Peter (2008-01-01). Nobel Faces. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9783527406784.
  13. 1 2 Badge, Peter (2008). Nobel Faces. John Wiley & Sons. p. 180. Retrieved December 2, 2015.
  14. 1 2 "Linda Buck Biography -- Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. Archived from the original on 2016-11-11. Retrieved 2016-04-04.
  15. ↑ "Linda B. Buck - Autobiography". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 7 November 2012.
  16. 1 2 Wayne, Tiffany K. (2010). "Linda B. Buck". American Women of Science since 1900. Santa Barbara, CA, USA: ABC-CLIO.
  17. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 7 April 2011.
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