On Oct. 4, 2004, the Nobel Assembly announced the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Richard Axel at Columbia University and Linda B. Buck at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center “for their discoveries of “odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.”

Axel and Buck published the fundamental paper jointly in 1991, in which they described the very large family of about one thousand genes for odorant receptors. Axel and Buck have since worked independent of each other, and they have in several elegant, often parallel, studies clarified the olfactory system, from the molecular level to the organization of the cells.

Buck joined the center in 2002 after 11 years as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School.