Nobel laureate to demystify the science of smell

Richard Axel will also receive 2014 Charlie Butcher Award

If you wonder how you’re able to smell the world’s stunning array of scents, Richard Axel has some answers, and he’ll share his insight in a public talk at CU-Boulder on Oct. 7.

Axel, a professor at Columbia University, has studied the olfactory processes in mammals for more than two decades. He won the 2004 Nobel Prize In Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of a large gene family that underlies the olfactory system in humans, allowing us to distinguish between more than 10,000 different smells.

Axel will discuss “Order from Disorder: Internal Representations of the Olfactory World” on Tuesday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. in the Mathematics Building auditorium on the University of Colorado Boulder Campus.

Also at that time, the CU BioFrontiers Institute will honor Axel with the 2014 Charlie Butcher Award for his work on the olfactory genome, believed to be the largest gene family in humans.

Nobel laureate and CU Distinguished Professor Tom Cech will give the award and introduction.

The Charlie Butcher Award is given yearly to recognize leading scientists from around the world who have made significant contributions to bioscience and biotechnology.

As part of the award, the BioFrontiers Institute is hosting the free public lecture by Axel.

This year marks the first time that the awards lecture was designed for a public audience. The broad appeal of the science of smell motivated the Institute to open this lecture to the community.

The sense of smell is essential to the survival of most species. The olfactory system is used to identify food, smell predators and observe and interpret their environments.

In humans, smells warn us if food has gone bad and can be powerful enough to trigger distinct memories years later.  A human nose has the remarkable ability to distinguish among more than 10,000 smells.

How it does that was long an enigma until Axel and his researchers discovered a pool of more than 1,000 different genes that encode olfactory receptors in the nose. This is believed to be the largest gene family in the human genome.

Axel will discuss his groundbreaking discovery that solves the puzzle of how we translate the sensations around us into knowledge that is key for our survival and quality of life.

Learn more about Axel's work in this Scientific American article. Learn more about the BioFrontiers Institute here.

Oct. 3, 2014