[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 134 (Friday, November 19, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Page S11628]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       HONORING DR. RICHARD AXEL

 Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, I rise today to honor Dr. Richard 
Axel, the co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Physiology or 
Medicine. Dr. Axel received this prize for research that he and his co-
recipient Dr. Linda Buck conducted on the ways in which our brains 
process smells. Drs. Axel and Buck are pioneers in the field of sensory 
biology, and have contributed much to our knowledge of how humans 
comprehend olfactory information. Their prize-winning research was 
conducted at Columbia University Medical Center, where Dr. Axel is a 
University Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and 
Pathology.
  Dr. Axel grew up in Brooklyn and received his earliest training at 
Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School. Because of his interest in science, 
he found a job as a glassware washer at a Columbia medical research 
facility, where he was soon promoted to a research position. By the 
time he graduated from Columbia College, his work had already been 
published in scientific journals. Dr. Axel has spent the majority of 
his subsequent career performing neuroscience research at Columbia 
University.
  I would like to note that Dr. Axel's prize is the latest in a series 
of distinguished scientific honors earned by residents of New York. The 
2003 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Dr. Roderick MacKinnon of 
Rockefeller University, and in 2000, Dr. Eric Kandel of Columbia 
University was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Physiology 
or Medicine.
  Next month, Dr. Axel will travel to Stockholm to accept the 2004 
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. I ask that all of my colleagues 
join me in congratulating Dr. Axel for receiving this tremendous honor. 
I look forward to learning of the future discoveries that will result 
from Dr. Axel's groundbreaking research.
  I ask that an article about Dr. Axel from In Vivo, the Columbia 
University Medical Center campus newspaper, be printed in the Record 
following my remarks.

                       A Life in Science Rewarded

                           (By Susan Conova)

       Discoveries made at CUMC about the sense of smell go beyond 
     providing a description of what most people think is merely 
     an aesthetic sense. Instead, understanding how the brain 
     distinguishes among a bewildering array of different odors 
     gives scientists a much greater understanding of how the 
     brain works.
       ``Odors generate specific behaviors and specific thoughts 
     and how that happens is still an unsolved and fascinating 
     mystery in brain science,'' says Richard Axel, M.D., 
     University Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics 
     and Pathology and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology 
     or Medicine on Oct. 4. ``Knowing how our perceptions of the 
     external world, including smell, impact our emotions and our 
     behavior will be extremely important in thinking about 
     diseases like schizophrenia to understand how the brain 
     works.''
       When Dr. Axel and his former postdoctoral researcher Linda 
     Buck, Ph.D., of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center 
     and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, 
     began their work in the late 1980s, very little was known 
     about the sense of smell.
       In 1985, Dr. Buck came across a paper describing the 
     unsolved question of how odors are detected in the nose and 
     was immediately hooked by ``the monumental problem and a 
     wonderful puzzle.''
       ``This paper opened up a fascinating new world for me,'' 
     she wrote earlier this year in the journal Cell. ``It was 
     estimated that humans could perceive 10,000 or more chemicals 
     as having distinct odors. How could the olfactory system 
     detect such an enormous diversity of chemicals? And how could 
     the nervous system translate this complexity of chemical 
     structures into a multitude of different odor perceptions?''
       The questions would remain unanswered unless the receptors 
     responsible for picking up odorants in the air were 
     identified. In 1988, Dr. Buck, working in Dr. Axel's lab at 
     P&S, started tracking them down.
       Several initial attempts failed. ``Linda was an extremely 
     creative and tenacious Fellow,'' Dr. Axel says. ``The 
     solution to this problem took quite a long time, but the 
     thoughtfulness of her approach made me think she would 
     eventually succeed.''
       In 1991 Drs. Axel and Buck broke the field open when they 
     published a paper describing an enormous family of genes in 
     mice that coded for 1,000 different receptors. The study was 
     reported in newspapers and other news media worldwide. Later 
     work revealed about 350 functional receptor genes in humans.
       ``We were quite surprised that up to 5 percent of the 
     genome was taken up by odor receptors,'' says Dr. Axel, also 
     a member of Columbia's Center for Neurobiology and Behavior. 
     ``That's a sharp distinction to the three genes that the 
     visual system uses to discriminate several hundred different 
     hues. It shows that a system like the visual system would be 
     inadequate to distinguish among the rich variety of odors in 
     the environment.''
       Gerald Fischbach, M.D., executive vice president and dean, 
     says the finding ranks among the most important discoveries 
     of the past 50 years: ``The discovery of the genes opened up 
     a field of sensory biology that didn't exist before.''
       Once the receptor genes were identified, both researchers 
     independently moved to the more complex question of how the 
     brain knows what the nose smells, with the support of the NIH 
     and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where the two are 
     investigators. Their labs and others have revealed that part 
     of the answer is that each odor produces a unique spatial 
     pattern, or map, of neuronal activity in the brain's 
     olfactory center. If the olfactory center was laid out like a 
     map of the United States, it would be as if the aroma from a 
     rose would light up Boston, New York, and San Francisco, 
     while rotting food would light up Los Angeles and Denver.
       The question now, Dr. Axel says, is figuring out how an 
     organism uses these odor maps. We can look down at the maps 
     of activity in an organism's brain and see what it's 
     smelling, but how does the process actually work within an 
     organism? ``To know that the world is interested in our work 
     will, I think, intensify our efforts toward reaching an 
     answer,'' Dr. Axel says.

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