2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 4 October 2004.

The citation

The citation reads: "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Richard Axel was born in 1946 in New York, the United States, and is affiliated with Columbia University, New York. Linda B. Buck was born in 1947 in Seattle, the United States, and is affiliated with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle.

Why it matters

Axel and Buck showed how a family of about 1,000 genes gives us a sense of smell, allowing people to recognise and remember around 10,000 different odours.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.