Prize for Place Cells Munich in Germany

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Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura persisted NOBEL PRIZES with gallium nitride long after their com- petitors had moved on to other materials, says Wolfgang Schnick, a materials chem- ist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Prize for place cells Munich in Germany. Their success in overcoming those hur- Discoverers of brain’s navigation system get physiology Nobel. dles has opened the door to white LEDs, which can have efficiencies nearly 20 times those of conventional bulbs. BY ALISON ABBOTT & EWEN CALLAWAY Almost all white LED-based lights consist of a blue LED chip combined with one or rain cells that make up the biological more luminescent materials, which convert equivalent of a satellite-navigation sys-

DAVID BISHOP/UCL DAVID part of the blue light to longer wavelengths. tem have garnered three scientists the “This has led to a revolution in the light- B2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. ing industry, and will have more and more The discovery of the cells sheds light on one of impact on the way people are lighting their neuroscience’s great mysteries — how we know homes,” says Dirk Poelman, a materials where we are in space. scientist at Ghent University in Belgium. John O’Keefe of University College London Schnick says that the development won half of the prize for his discovery in 1971 “cannot be estimated too highly”. “This will of ‘place’ cells in the hippocampus, a part of help to save up to 20% of the global electric- the brain associated with memory. Edvard and ity consumption,” he says. May-Britt Moser, who are married and jointly Schnick added that in future, blue LEDs run a lab at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neu- are likely to find uses in portable devices roscience in Trondheim, Norway, share the that can disinfect or sterilize water, and other half for their 2005 discovery of ‘grid’ cells perhaps in computer memories that use in an adjacent brain structure, the entorhinal light instead of electricity to store data. cortex. Along with other navigation cells, grid Blue lasers — also invented by Akasaki and and place cells allow animals to keep track of John O’Keefe, co-winner of a 2014 Nobel prize. Amano, and separately by Nakamura — are their position. Both cell types were discovered already used in Blu-ray Disc technology. in rats, but have since been found in humans. when rats pass the points of a hexagonal grid. The story is not without twists. Naka- “Understanding where we are in space is one They found out that the brain uses this pattern mura, who left Japan in 2000 to join the of the most fundamental issues for survival,” as a coordinate system for spatial navigation University of California, Santa Barbara, says Tobias Bonhoeffer, director of the Max (T. Hafting et al. Nature 436, 801–806; 2005). sued Nichia in 2001 over the scant com- Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martin- The pattern constitutes what is known as a pensation he received for inventing the sried, Germany. neural code. It is the only one known to be gen- blue LED technology while he worked The discoveries will also be key to answering erated entirely in the brain, marking a milestone there. The case was settled in January 2005, the broader question of how the brain makes for computational neuroscience (see page 154). when Nakamura accepted ¥840 million sense of the world, says neuroscientist Botond Both place and grid cells have practical rel- (US$8.1 million at the time). “Nakamura Roska of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for evance. The early stages of Alzheimer’s disease was quite determined to show that gal- Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. affect the entorhinal cortex, and one of the first lium nitride could be an effective LED “These are three deep-thinking people who symptoms is losing one’s way. The disease goes technology. He pushed it very hard — it have changed the way we think about the on to devastate the hippocampus, stripping was something they were not initially brain,” he says. sufferers of their memories. “It is a good exam- concentrating on,” says Martin Dawson, Most neuroscientists once doubted that brain ple of how very basic research can help us gain a photonics researcher at the University of activity could be linked with behaviour, but in the deeper understanding we need in such dev- Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. the late 1960s, O’Keefe began to record signals astating diseases to move towards therapies,” Speaking on a crackling telephone line to from individual neurons in the brains of rats says Richard Morris, a memory researcher at journalists in Sweden on 7 October, Naka- moving freely in a box. He put electrodes in the the University of Edinburgh, UK. mura said that the feeling of winning the hippocampus and was surprised to find that May-Britt was presiding over a lab meeting prize was “unbelievable”. Staffan Normark, individual cells fired when the rats moved to when the call came from the Nobel committee permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish particular spots. He concluded that the memory in Stockholm. “I hesitated to answer it,” she told Academy of Sciences, told journalists that of an environment may be stored as a specific Nature, laughing. “But I did — and I couldn’t the trio had not been expecting the prize. combination of place-cell activities in the hippo believe it; I even cried.” Edvard’s excitement was “They had not been waiting all day and all campus (J. O’Keefe and J. Dostrovsky Brain Res. delayed: he was on a aeroplane to Munich, Ger- night for this call,” he said. 34, 171–175; 1971). “I realized that if you put many, when his wife got the call. O’Keefe heard Announcing the prize, Per Delsing, them all together, you could have something like the news while working on a grant revision at chairman of the academy’s Nobel Com- a map,” says O’Keefe. home. “I’m totally delighted and thrilled,” he mittee for Physics, said that the award Fast-forward to the 1990s, and his work said in front of a phalanx of television cameras cherished the tradition of its founder, the attracted the attention of the Mosers, then PhD at a London press conference. engineer and inventor Alfred Nobel. “I students at the University of Oslo. They joined The Mosers once described their time in really think that Alfred Nobel would have him in London as postdocs, but within months O’Keefe’s lab as “probably the most intense been happy about this prize,” he said. ■ they had moved to the Norwegian University learning experience in our lives”. O’Keefe has of Science and Technology in Trondheim to similar memories. “It was intense — because Additional reporting by Richard Van set up their own lab. There they discovered they’re intense. They’re absolutely superb Noorden. that some cells in the entorhinal cortex fire scientists.” ■