Though he was put on a short list of favorites by Thomson Reuters, Charles Lee, the scientific director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, will not receive a Nobel Prize this year.
Early Monday morning, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announced that two Norwegians and a 74-year-old British American scientist would share in the 2014 prize for their research that has illuminated how the brain maps and helps navigate the physical space around it.
In 1971, in an experiment with rats, John O’Keefe discovered the first component of the brain’s positioning system — “place cells” that activated depending on the rat’s location, the Institute’s Nobel Assembly said in an announcement.
In 2005, Norwegian scientists Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser, who are husband and wife, identified “grid cells,” which generate a coordinate system that allows for positioning and pathfinding, according to the assembly.
