Richard Axel

Origins and early life

Richard Axel was born in New York City on 2 July 1946 to Polish Jewish immigrants and grew up in Brooklyn. He left Stuyvesant High School in 1963, took his bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1967 and a medical degree at Johns Hopkins in 1971 — graduating, by his own account, on a promise to his department chairman that he would never practise clinically.

Work and career

He returned to Columbia the same year and was a full professor by 1978. In the late 1970s, with Saul Silverstein and Michael Wigler, he worked out how to insert foreign DNA into a host cell so that it would make a chosen protein; the patents on that technique became a foundation of the biotechnology industry. His own subject, though, was smell. With Linda Buck, then a postdoctoral researcher in his laboratory, he found the very large family of genes that encode the receptors in the nose, and then traced how the signal from each receptor is carried into an orderly map in the brain.

The two shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004. He is a university professor at Columbia and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.