Nobel laureate Dr. Linda Buck elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2008 Class ...( SEATTLE Nobel laureate Linda Buck P...)

SEATTLE Nobel laureate Linda Buck, Ph.D., member of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, or AAAS, one of the nations oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy-research centers. She is among 190 new fellows and 22 foreign honorary members to join the AAAS 2008 class of fellows. Drawn from the sciences, the arts and humanities, public affairs and the nonprofit sector, AAAS fellows are leaders in their fields. This years class includes Nobel laureates, recipients of Pulitzer and Pritzker prizes, Academy and Grammy awards and Kennedy Center honors. The latest honorees include blues guitarist B.B. King, filmmakers Ethan and Joel Cohen, and astronomer Adam Riess, who contributed to the discovery of dark energy in the universe. (Please see below for link to AAAS news release and complete list of winners.)

Buck in 2004 received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for her groundbreaking work on odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system the network responsible for our sense of smell. She shared the honor with Richard Axel, Ph.D., of Columbia University.

Buck, who joined the Hutchinson Center faculty in 2002 after 11 years as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, is the fifth Hutchinson Center researcher to be elected for AAAS membership.

She was a senior postdoctoral researcher in Axels laboratory when she disclosed the nature of the olfactory receptors, and they co-published this work in 1991. Their work is the first to define one of our sensory systems in the most detailed manner possible by defining the genes and proteins that control this remarkably complex response. This was a landmark achievement in the study of the nervous system.

The basic principles for recognizing and remembering about 10,000 different odors have long been a mystery. In a series of pioneerin
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