From running rats to brain maps: A Nobel odyssey
It’s been 10 years since the Mosers won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with their former mentor and colleague John O’Keefe. Listen to the Mosers themselves tell the story of how they came to discover grid cells, the neurons that help form a GPS in the brain.
When the phone rang 10 years ago while Norwegian neuroscientist May-Britt Moser was in a particularly engaging lab meeting, she almost didn’t answer it.
Good thing she did!
It was Göran Hansson, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, with the news. May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, along with John O’Keefe from the University College London, had just won the Nobel Prize for their discoveries of types of neurons that work together to function like a GPS in the brain.
A figure showing the regular hexagonal signal from a grid cell. Each firing of the cell is shown as a black dot. The path of the freely roaming rat is shown in grey. Graphic: Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience
That system allows animals -including us – to know where they are, and navigate to where they want to go.
This was a groundbreaking discovery because it gave us critical insight into how an area of the brain, far from the normal sensory inputs of sight, sound and smell, constructs its own way of understanding space.
And, because this same area of the brain, and our ability to navigate, are affected early on in Alzheimer’s patients, it offers an inroad for clinicians studying the disease. In fact, the KG Jebsen Centre for Alzheimer’s Disease, a part of the Mosers’ Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, is working to bring these and other fundamental insights about the brain to clinical practice.
But just what did it take for the Mosers to make their groundbreaking discovery? Listen to this special episode of 63 Degrees North where May-Britt and Edvard Moser describe their quest to understand the inner workings of the brain – and how they discovered the specialized cells they named grid cells.
