The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday
John O’Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on cells that form a positioning system in the brain.
According to a report by CNN, the research helps to understand better how people orient themselves and how it could be useful in Alzheimer’s research, because of the part of the brain those cells lie in — the hippocampus.
The Nobel Committee in a statement said the scientists have primarily helped to answer the fundamental questions of how we know where we are, where we are going and how we remember it all, so that we able able repeat our trips.
London neuroscientist O’Keefe made the first discovery in 1971, when he came upon a nerve cell in the brain of a rat that was set off whenever the rat was in a particular place. The scientist called them “place cells.”
The Mosers, Nowegian neuroscientists, discovered another component in 2005.
“They identified another type of nerve cell, which they called “grid cells,” that generate a coordinate system and allow for precise positioning and path-finding,” the statement read.
Later, they also figured out how place and grid cells work together to make the brain know where it is and where it’s headed.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday. Each prize comes with 8m Swedish kronor ($1.2m).
Two Americans and a German shared the Nobel Prize in medicine last year.
The researchers’ answers have to do with the way special brain cells work together.
Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel created the prizes in 1895 to honor work in physics, chemistry, literature and peace. The first economics prize was awarded in 1969.
Source: Dhaka Tribune