Linda Buck is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Richard Axel in 2004.
Linda Buck was born in 1947 in Seattle, Washington. Her mother was a homemaker, who loved solving word puzzles and her father, an electrical engineer, spent much of his time inventing and building things. This probably inspired Linda to pursue science and develop problem-solving skills. She received her B.Sc in psychology and microbiology in 1975 and moved to the University of Texas, Dallas, gaining a PhD in immunology in 1980.
As a postdoctoral student, Buck worked under Professor Richard Axel in the early 1980s at Columbia University in New York City. Sol Snyder’s 1985 publication about odour detection inspired Buck to find odour receptors. She began her study in 1988, along with Axel. By analysing DNA of laboratory rats, they estimated that there are approximately 1000 different genes for olfactory receptors in rats. Buck and Axel published their findings in 1991. These receptors are proteins responsible for detecting the odourant molecules in the air. The receptors are located in the back of the nasal cavity.
Axel and Buck later determined that the sense of smell are almost identical in rats, humans, and other animals, although humans have only about 350 types of working olfactory receptors. Buck held various positions with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and at Harvard Medical School from 1984 until 2002. She joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in 2002.
She was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Buck continues her work on smell, but is also working to identify genes that control ageing and lifespan.
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