Newest Nobelists Received 2013 Horwitz Prize from Columbia University

Columbia University Medical Center congratulates this year’s Nobel Prize winners Edvard I. Moser, PhD; May-Britt Moser, PhD; and John Michael O’Keefe, PhD.

The three received Columbia’s 2013 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the University’s top honor for achievement in biology and biochemistry research. More than half of the recipients of the Horwitz Prize, awarded since 1967, have gone on to receive Nobels.

Read the Columbia University Horwitz Prize announcement. Videos of Horwitz Lectures can be found here.

Eric Kandel, 2000 Nobel Prize recipient, discusses the work of the three 2014 Nobelists:

References

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognizes an extraordinary set of contributions to brain science.

The work began in 1971 with John O’Keefe. He had two major insights. The first is that representation of space in the brain is not mediated by a single sensory modality, such as touch, vision, or smell. Instead, space is computed through the combining of information about touch, vision, smell, and vestibular sensation in the hippocampus. Thus space represents a higher-order, abstract, cognitive function. The second insight is that the “place cells” that make up the spatial map in the hippocampus are not organized topographically as are vision and touch, for example, but randomly. Neighboring hippocampal cells do not encode neighboring positions in space.

May-Britt and Edvard I. Moser, who trained with O’Keefe, then went on to show that the spatial map is not exclusive to the hippocampus. They discovered the “grid cells” in the entorhinal cortex, which also encode spatial location. Unlike the “place cells” of the hippocampus, which encode a specific location, the regularly spaced “grid cells” of the entorhinal cortex provide a global description. Searching further in the entorhinal cortex, the Mosers found “head direction” and “border” cells, which also enable us to find and remember our way. Together, these three groups of cells in the entorhinal cortex provide critical input necessary to form the spatial map in the hippocampus.

In short, the work of John O’Keefe and May-Britt and Edvard Moser hasilluminated the neural computation underlying a complex cognitive function: position in space—the first cognitive function we understand on the cellular level.