O’Keefe, Moser couple win 2014 Nobel Prize for Medicine

A couple and a UK-based researcher have been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine for their work on the discovery of the “human global positioning system, GPS”.

According to the official website of the Nobel assembly, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided – one half awarded to John O’Keefe, and the other jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser (pictured) “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”.

John O’keefe is a 75-year-old neuroscientist and a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Department of Anatomy, University College London. He is responsible for the discovery of the first part of the brain’s internal positioning system in 1971.

May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser are a couple known to have pioneered research on the brain’s mechanism for representing space during the last decade.

The Norwegian couple are psychologists and neuroscientists, and are the founding directors of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

This set of winners discovered how the brain knows where we are and is able to navigate from one place to another seamlessly. This discovery may help explain why in Alzheimer’s disease patients, cannot recognise their surroundings.

“The discoveries have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries,” the Nobel Assembly said.

O’keefe’s works showed that a set of nerve cells became activated whenever a rat was in one location in a room, while a different set of cells were active when the rat was in a different area, with “place cells”, located in the hippocampus, forming a map within the brain.

In 2005, May-Britt and Edvard discovered a different part of the brain which acts more like a nautical chart. These “grid cells” are similar to lines of longitude and latitude, helping the brain to judge distance and navigate.

The Nobel committee said the combination of grid and place cells constituted a “comprehensive positioning system, an inner GPS” in the brain.

“A better understanding of neural mechanisms underlying spatial memory is therefore important and the discoveries of place and grid cells have been a major leap forward to advance this endeavour,” it added.

While announcing the winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, secretary of the Nobel Assembly, Goran K Hansson, said the winner(s) of the Nobel Prize for Literature would be announced on Thursday.

All three Nobel laureates won Columbia University’s Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize last year for their discoveries. They will split the Nobel prize money of 8 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million).