Richard Axel

(from my old blog)

Two days ago I was talking to a rotation student in the lab about the Nobel laureate and Columbia Professor Richard Axel, then last night at another BBQ (this time at Ben's place), the biology of olfactory was brought up, and finally this morning flipping through the Columbia University Magazine, there was an article on ... Richard Axel.

My first recollection of Dr. Axel was in a graduate student class I attended at Columbia. A bald, tall, and lanky individual in a suit walked into the room, sat down on the front desk, crossed his legs and said "So what do you want me to talk about?" He gives the paradoxical appearance of aloofness mixed with intense concentration.

Apparently in high school (Stuyvesant High) he played center for the school basketball team ... and once faced-off against against Lew Alcindor (who later renamed himself Kareem Abdul-Jabar). Apparently Alcindor taunted him by calling him Einstein. Once in college (at Columbia University) he was hired to wash dishes for Bernie Weinstein's lab. Since he asked many questions but broke much or the glassware they fired him after the first day, and rehired him as a research assistant.

He originally wanted to study English or Biology, then the Vietnam War arrived. To avoid the draft he applied to med school - but then spent his entire subsequent career as a researcher as he disliked dealing with patients (and as a pathologist disliked dealing with corpses). Although he is now famous for his discovery (with his then postdoctoral fellow, Linda Buck) that the human genome contains about a thousand or so odorant receptors (all belonging to the G-couple receptor protein family), he was involved in many serendipitous but key scientific findings.

He cloned one of the key proteins involved in Cell Polarity, Rho (for Ras Homologue). What is strange is that he cloned it from Aplasia, the giant slug with giant neurons, first popularized by another Columbia Nobel Laureate. Dr. Axel was also an author on the paper that first described how to introduce foreign DNA into cells using lipid. From this paper, Columbia patented DNA transfection, the single most profitable Biotechnology patent to date (for you lab rats, think about that every time you use lipofectamine and other related products). His lab is currently investigating olfactory perception as a model of brain function.

There are many other Axel stories, but you can read up about some of them at the Nobel Site.

Ref:

Buck, L., and Axel, R., A Novel Multi gene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognition, Cell (1991) 65:175-187

Wigler, M., Pellicer, A., Silverstein, S. and Axel, R. Biochemical transfer of single-copy eukaryotic genes using total cellular DNA as donor. Cell (1978)14:725¿731

Madaule, P. and Axel, R. A novel Ras-related gene family. Cell (1985) 41:31-40