A Bronx-bred City College grad has won the world’s top honor in science, snagging the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering “an inner GPS in the brain” that makes navigation possible for all living things.
Long before Garmin and TomTom simplified our trips with turn-by-turn directions, the brain had the innate ability to get us from one place to another, according to British-American scientist John O’Keefe, 75, who will share the $1.1 million award with two other researchers, the prize committee announced Monday. O’Keefe is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London.
The scientists “have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries — how does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment,” the Nobel Assembly announced.
“I am totally delighted and thrilled and I am probably still in a state of shock,” O’Keefe said. “It’s a terrific accolade. It is the highest accolade you can get and I think it’s a terrific sign of the way the world thinks about the work.”
The laureates’ findings may eventually lead to a better understanding of the spatial losses that occur in Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.
“It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that’s attacked by Alzheimer’s disease,” O’Keefe said. “We hope to follow the progression of the disease over time. This will give us the first handle or where it starts and when it starts and how we can attack it at a molecular level.”
Building on O’Keefe’s 40-year-old research, which uncovered a nerve cell that was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room, husband-and-wife team May-Britt and Edvard Moser identified another type of nerve cell that permits coordination and positioning.
The Mosers are among the few married couples who have shared a Nobel Prize — and only the second in the medicine category. They went to the same high school, but met at the University of Oslo. Now, they are neuroscientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
O’Keefe said he was working at home when his office called to say “there’s a gentleman from Sweden who wants to have a word with you.” (The Karolinska Institute, which awards Nobel Prizes in medicine, is based in Sweden.)
“Before I called him, I took a long, deep breath,” said O’Keefe. “If you can survive the South Bronx, you can survive anything.”