Women Scientists

Linda Buck 1947-

At a glance:

American Nobel prize winner honoured for her work on smell in 2004

Linda Buck didn't decide on science as a career until she was nearly 30. Seattle born, she originally took psychology thinking that she wanted to be a psychotherapist. She drifted from one thing to another for several years after graduating but then she took a class in immunology and was instantly hooked. Only at this stage did she know that she wanted to be a biologist. She worked in Texas before joining Richard Axel at Columbia University. In the mid eighties she read a paper on smell and was intrigued. How could humans recognise and remember 10,000 or more different smells when some were virtually identical chemically? It was the beginning of work to find out how the human olfactory (smell) system work. It revealed that each odour receptor in the nose makes just one of a thousand possible receptors. A smell may activate many, to a greater or lesser degree, so that each smell generates its own unique scent fingerprint. Now at Harvard, Buck works on pheromones and anti-ageing.
Linda Buck

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