Linda B. Buck was born inSeattle, Washington on January 29, 1947. Her father was an electrical engineer who spent his time inventing and building different items in his spare time, while her mother was a homemaker who spent a majority of her free time solving word puzzles.[9] Buck was the second of three children, all of whom are girls.[10] Her father has Irish ancestry as well as ancestors dating back to the American revolution. Her mother is of Swedish ancestry.[11] In 1994 Buck metRoger Brent, also a biologist. The two married in 2006.[12]
In 1980, Buck beganpostdoctoral research at Columbia University under Benvenuto Pernis (1980–1982). In 1982, she joined the laboratory of Richard Axel, also at Columbia in the Institute of Cancer Research. After reading Sol Snyder's group research paper atJohns Hopkins University, Buck set out to map the olfactory process at the molecular level, tracing the travel of odors through the cells of the nose to the brain. Buck and Axel worked with rat genes in their research and identified a family of genes that code for more than 1000 odor receptors and published these findings in 1991.[5][15] Later that year, Buck became an assistant professor in theNeurobiology Department atHarvard Medical School where she established her own lab.[16] After finding how odors are detected by the nose, Buck published her findings in 1993 on how the inputs from different odor receptors are organized in the nose.[15] Essentially, her primary research interest is on howpheromones andodors are detected in the nose and interpreted in the brain. She is a Full Member of the Basic Sciences Division atFred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and an Affiliate Professor ofPhysiology andBiophysics at the University of Washington, Seattle.
In her landmark paper published in 1991 with Richard Axel, Linda Buck discovered hundreds of genes code for the odorant sensors located in the olfactory neurons of our noses.[14] Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odor attaches to the receptor, causing an electrical signal to be sent to the brain.[10] Differences between odorant sensors mean that certain odors cause a signal to be released from a certain receptor.[10] We are then able to interpret varying signals from our receptors as specific scents.[10] To do this, Buck and Axelcloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family ofG protein-coupled receptors. By analyzingratDNA, they estimated that there were approximately 1,000 differentgenes for olfactory receptors in themammaliangenome.[17][18] This research opened the door to thegenetic andmolecular analysis of the mechanisms ofolfaction. In their later work, Buck and Axel have shown that eacholfactory receptor neuron remarkably only expresses one kind of olfactory receptor protein and that the input from all neurons expressing the same receptor is collected by a single dedicatedglomerulus of theolfactory bulb.
Buck retracted 3 papers, published inNature (pub. 2001, retracted 2008),Science (pub 2006, retracted 2010) andProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (pub 2005, retracted 2010) due to falsification/fabrication of results by lead author and collaborator Zhihua Zou.[23]
