Trio to Nobel Prize in Medicine 2014

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Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded to three scientists who discovered the brain’s GPS system. British-American researcher John O’Keefe and a Norwegian couple, Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser share the award.

They discovered how the brain knows where we are and is able to navigate from one place to another. Their findings may help explain why in Alzheimer’s disease patients cannot recognise their surroundings.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine  2014 is  awarded on Monday to American-British neuroscientist John O’Keefe, and Norwegian scientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain, which was described as an “inner GPS.”

O’Keefe, is of dual citizenship of  American and British citizenship, is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and the director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in Neural Circuits and Behavior at the University College London. He discovered the first component of the positioning system in 1971.

May-Britt Moser professor of neuroscience and the director of the Centre for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Her husband Edvard Moser is also a professor at the university, and the director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience.

The Mosers are the fifth married couple to be awarded a Nobel Prize. In 2005, they discovered a type of nerve cell that generates a coordinate system and allowing for precise positioning.