Three scientists share Nobel Prize in medicine for brain GPS

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U.S.-British scientist John O’Keefe and Norwegian married couple May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering the brain’s positioning system.

This “inner GPS” helps explain how the brain creates “a map of the space surrounding us and how we can navigate our way through a complex environment,” the Nobel Assembly said.

O’Keefe, of University College London, discovered the first component of this positioning system in 1971 when he found that a certain type of nerve cell was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room.

Thirty-four years later May-Britt and Edvard Moser, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, identified another type of nerve cell that generates a co-ordinate system for precise path-finding, the assembly said.

It said that knowledge about the brain’s positioning system may “help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial memory loss” that affects people with Alzheimer’s disease.

A Canadian researcher had been among those touted as a potential winners of the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine by an organization that predicts which scientists are most likely to take home one of the coveted awards.

Dr. Stephen Scherer, director of the Centre for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, was selected as a 2014 “Nobel-class” citation laureate in physiology or medicine by Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science. The organization has correctly predicted 35 Nobel Prize winners since 2002.

Scherer, along with Charles Lee, scientific director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Conn., and Michael H. Wigler, head of the Mammalian Cell Genetics Section at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, have been recognized for the discovery of large-scale copy number variations and their association with specific genetic diseases.

Scherer had said he was astounded and surprised by the honour, calling it “a big, big thing.”

The Nobel awards in physics, chemistry, literature and peace will be announced later this week. The economics prize will be announced next Monday.

With files from The Canadian Press

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