The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014
Born: 4 January 1963, Fosnavåg, Norway
Affiliation at the time of the award: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
Prize motivation: “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”
Work
The awareness of one’s location and how to find the way to other places is crucial for both humans and animals. In 2005 May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser discovered a type of cell that is important for determining position close to the hippocampus, an area located in the center of the brain. They found that when a rat passed certain points arranged in a hexagonal grid in space, nerve cells that form a kind of co-ordinate system for navigation were activated. They then went on to demonstrate how these different cell types cooperate.
