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Nobel Prize 2014: British scientist John O'Keefe among winners of prestigious award for medicine after discovery of 'brain's internal GPS' Nobel Prize 2014: British scientist John O'Keefe among winners of prestigious award for medicine after discovery of 'brain's internal GPS'
(35 minutes later)
A British-American scientist has been named as part of a team awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine after discovering the brain’s “internal GPS system”. Three foreign-born scientists who have all worked in the UK have jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering research into how the brain works out where we are by creating internal “maps” of the real world.
John O’Keefe, along with Norwegians May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, carried out research that explains how humans are able to orient themselves in space, as well as helping to understand diseases like Alzheimer’s. John O’Keefe, who was born in the United States but has worked at University College London for more than 40 years, shares the prize with husband-and-wife team May-Britt and Edvard Moser, who were born in Norway but have carried out research in Edinburgh and London.
 O'Keefe is director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in Neural Circuits and Behaviour at University College London. The three researchers share this year’s prize for “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain” according to the citation from the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute.
The Mosers, meanwhile, join an exclusive club of married couples to win a Nobel Prize that includes scientific greats Pierre Curie and Marie Curie. They are both based in scientific institutes in the Norwegian town of Trondheim. Professor O’Keefe, director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at UCL, discovered the first components of the brain’s internal positioning system when he found a type of cell in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that was always activated when a laboratory rat was at a certain place in a room.
“The discoveries...have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said in a statement when awarding the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns (£690,000). In a study published in 1971, Professor O’Keefe called these “place cells” and suggested that they were used by the brain to build up a map of the environment. In 2005, the May-Britt and Edvard Moser, who are currently based in Trondheim, Norway, discovered other nerve cells in a nearby part of the brain that were activated when the rat passed certain locations.
“How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?” the award committee said. The two Norwegian scientists found that these locations formed a hexagonal grid with each “grid cell” within the entorhinal cortex of the brain reacting in a unique spatial pattern – collectively the grid cells form a coordinated system that allowed spatial navigation through a complex maze.
“Knowledge about the brain's positioning system may, therefore, help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial loss that affects people with this (Alzheimer's) disease,” the body added.
Medicine is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
Additional reporting by Reuters