This year's winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, US researchers Richard Axel and Linda B Buck, were honoured for their work on mammals' sense of smell.
Richard Axel was born on July 2 1946, in New York. He earned his MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1970, and eight years later became a professor of pathology and biochemistry at Columbia University, where he has held various professorships to this day.
Axel has also since 1984 been an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University, where in 1991 he published a paper with Linda B. Buck in which they described the more than 1,000 odorant receptor genes.
His early work concentrated on the development of gene transfer techniques that permitted the introduction of virtually any gene into any cell, making it possible to analyse gene function within a living organism.
Axel later applied the techniques of molecular biology to problems of neurobiology. This allowed for the identification of peptide genes responsible for eliciting an innate behavior in a marine snail, a discovery that suggests that behavioural patterns could be encoded in genetic material.
His recent work has concentrated on the molecular logic of olfactory perception, discovering in parallel with Buck a large gene family which is the basis for our ability to recognise approximately 10,000 different odours, such as lilacs, wine or strawberries, and remember them all our lives.