Buck, an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), has spent 14 years trying to unravel the mysteries of the olfactory system.

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"It would be a major triumph for basic science if a drug were to come from this, "says Matthew Scott, an HHMI cancer genetics expert at Stanford University.

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Dr Kobilka - who is now at Stanford University in California - joined the HHMI team in the 1980s, and they took another tack to discover how the receptors come about, searching within the human genome for the code that lays out the genetic instructions for them.

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"Linda has made a wonderful set of contributions about the specificity of connections and the functional read-out both in the intermediate station and the cerebral cortex, " says Eric Kandel , a university professor at Columbia and senior investigator at HHMI, whose research into the brain earned him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000.

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