Linda Buck
Appearances
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
That's one of the things I love about doing science.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
It's really puzzle solving. What you find is so beautiful. Nature's designs are so elegant.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
The first question was how you can detect up to 100,000 chemicals in the environment in the nose. How is that done? I became completely obsessed with this. This was it. I had to solve the problem.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
So I decided that the first step had to be to find out how odorous molecules or odorants are detected in the nose. Nothing else mattered.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
This was actually a very high-risk project, and in retrospect, it was potentially suicidal. I mean, potentially suicidal in terms of a career.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
I'm a very empirical scientist. I don't theorize because what usually happens is that the answer, the biological mechanisms that are used, are usually far more elegant than the theories that people come up with.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
Eventually. She figured it out. It was a Saturday night, I think, and I was in my kitchen. Sitting in her house, looking at the results of her experiments, she recognized a pattern. And I had colored pens. And I had written down the sequence. Her life's work. The genomic sequence of the smell receptors in the nose.
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
It was really beautiful. I remember just being stunned looking at them when I first had the first set of them. Linda couldn't believe what she was seeing. And I had a friend in the other room who was watching TV or something. I kept running back and forth saying, look at this. Can you believe this?
Throughline
History of the Self: Smell and Memory
It was like patchwork quilts, where bits and pieces were exchanged between the different receptors to make proteins that would be able to detect different odorants.