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Yuriy Akopov · @y_akopov

7th Oct 2015 from TwitLonger

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Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden
10/7/15 10:40 PM
Loc 2299-2329

Richard Axel was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948, the first child of immigrant parents who had fled Poland before the Nazi invasion. His childhood was typical for the neighbourhood: running errands for his father, a tailor, between playing stickball (a kind of street baseball, with manhole covers as the bases and a broom handle as bat) or basketball in the local roads and courtyards. His first job, aged eleven, was as a messenger, delivering false teeth to dentists; at twelve he was laying carpets, and at thirteen serving corned beef and pastrami in a local delicatessen. The chef was a Russian who used to recite Shakespeare while slicing cabbage heads, providing the young Richard with his first real exposure to the cultural world beyond delis and basketball courts and inspiring a deep and abiding love of great literature. Axel’s intellectual talents were spotted by a local high-school teacher who encouraged him to apply, successfully, for a scholarship to Columbia University in New York to read literature.

As a freshman, Axel threw himself into the intellectual maelstrom of university life in the 1960s. But to support his party-going lifestyle he took a job washing glassware in a molecular genetics laboratory. He became fascinated by this emerging science, but remained hopeless at glass washing, so was sacked from that job and rehired as a research assistant. Torn between literature and science, he eventually decided to enrol in a graduate genetics course but then switched to studying medicine to escape the Vietnam draft. He was apparently as bad at medicine as he’d been at glass washing. He couldn’t hear a heart murmur and never saw the retina; his glasses once fell into an abdominal incision and he even managed to sew a surgeon’s finger to his patient. He was eventually allowed to graduate only on condition that he promise never to practise medicine on living patients. He returned to Columbia to study pathology, but after a year the chairman of the department insisted that he should never practise on dead patients either.

Realizing that medicine clearly lay beyond his talents, Axel eventually managed to return to research at Columbia University. Thereafter he made rapid progress and even invented a novel technique for getting foreign DNA inside mammalian cells that became a mainstay of the genetic engineering/biotech revolution of the late twentieth century and earned Columbia University hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in licensing agreements: a generous return on their scholarship investment.

By the 1980s Axel was wondering whether molecular biology could help to solve that mystery of mysteries: how the human brain works. He switched from studying the behaviour of genes to studying the genes for behaviour, with the long-term aim of ‘dissecting how higher brain centers generate a “percept,” say, of the scent of a lilac, or coffee, or a skunk …’. His first foray into neuroscience was investigating egg-laying behaviour in a marine snail. It was at about this time that a very talented researcher, Linda Buck, joined his lab. She had trained as an immunologist at the University of Dallas before becoming fascinated by the emerging field of molecular neuroscience and moving to Axel’s laboratory to be at the forefront of this research.

Together, Axel and Buck devised an ingenious series of experiments to probe the molecular basis of smell. The first question they addressed was the identity of the receptor molecules that were presumed to exist on the surface of olfactory neurons and to capture and identify different odorant molecules. Extrapolating from what was known about other sensory cells, they guessed that the receptors were some kind of proteins poking out of the cell membrane where they could bind passing odour molecules; but, at the time, nobody had ever isolated any of these odour receptors so no one had a clue what they looked like or how they worked. All the team had to go on was an inkling that the elusive receptors might belong to a family of proteins called G-protein-coupled receptors that were known to be involved in detecting other kinds of chemical signals, such as hormones.

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