A marriage, Twitter and cerebral Nobel GPS – The World

Before his nearly 600 followers on Twitter, May-Britt Moser is presented as a professor of neuroscience at the Kavli Institute of Norway, who runs with her husband since the creation of this institution in 2007 This Norwegian marriage is permission of Shinya Yamanaka (awarded in 2012), one of the most publicized of Medicine Nobel recent years -shared in 2014 with John O’Keefe. This is the fifth time in history that a marriage is honored, and probably the first time a Nobel can be complimented through Twitter.

The three awarded by the Karolinska Institute have established with three decades apart, the complex brain mechanisms that enable humans to orient themselves and navigate space.

The largest of the three winners, O’Keefe (New York, 1939), began his studies on the behavior of rats in the 60′s, after graduating from McGill University in Canada. In 1971, with Jonathan Dostrovsky, he discovered a type of cell in the hippocampus of rats, was activated intermittently with every change of position in a room performing animals.

O’Keefe, who has twice British and American passport, showed that these calls ‘place cells’ were not only visual information recording new place, but building a mental map . This specialist College London University-the institution that has spent his entire career scientifically concluded that the hippocampus is able to generate and store multiple of these mental representations.

Decades later, the work of O’Keefe served as the basis for marriage when two Norwegian Moser began his work to map the connections that develop in the hippocampus of a rat.

Neurologists photogenic Norwegians, with a closer look at the authors of contemporary crime novel than the usual laboratory colleagues, established in 2002, the Centre of Memory Norwegian image, only three year later, they discovered another type of cells that complete the complex ‘GPS cerebral’.

May-Britt (Fosnavag, 1963) and Edvard (Alesund, 1962) found in a region near the hippocampus (cortex entorhinal) calls ‘Grid cells’ (English grid) helped coordinate responsible for the navigation of the brain through a physical space. As discovered later, the coordination of these two families of cells in our brain is what allows support certain forms of spatial memory, not only in animals but also in humans.

Although the two knew from school (their birthplaces are two islands), it was not until its passage by the University of Oslo as became a couple. There, she majored in Psychology and Neurophysiology him, but together they traveled to Edinburgh University to continue their education, and the University College of London, where they agreed under the supervision of O’Keefe. In 1996 they both went to the University of Trondheim.

Edvard, passionate about volcanoes, was traveling by plane to Munich at the time the award was announced. Meanwhile, his wife tweeted: ‘I’m still in shock. This is so fabulous. ” Norwegian researcher explained that some data was debating with his colleagues when he received the Nobel committee called with the news. “The talk was so interesting that almost did not answer the phone” .