Richard Axel

Did You Know?

• Axel played basketball during high school owing to his tall stature.
• He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.
• He was awarded the Double Helix Medal in 2007 and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2014.

Education and early life

Richard Axel was raised in Brooklyn after his parents, Polish Jewish immigrants, settled in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, graduating in 1963, then earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1967 and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1971. Medicine was not his strength; he secured his degree only by pledging not to practice clinically. He discovered his true path in research, returning to Columbia that same year and rising to full professor by 1978.

Research and career

In the late 1970s, Richard Axel, alongside microbiologist Saul J. Silverstein and geneticist Michael H. Wigler, developed a method called cotransformation via transfection. This technique lets scientists insert foreign DNA into a host cell to make specific proteins. A set of patents, widely known as the Axel patents, was filed in February 1980 and granted in August 1983. These patents became essential for recombinant DNA work in pharmaceutical and biotech companies, bringing Columbia University roughly $100 million annually at its peak, until they expired in August 2000. A major breakthrough came in 1991 when Axel and Linda Buck published a landmark paper. They cloned olfactory receptors and showed these receptors belong to the G protein coupled receptor family. By studying rat DNA, they calculated that the mammalian genome contains about one thousand distinct genes for olfactory receptors. Their later research revealed that each olfactory receptor neuron expresses just one type of olfactory receptor protein, and all neurons with the same receptor send their signals to a single dedicated glomerulus in the olfactory bulb. Axel’s main research focus is understanding how the brain processes smell, particularly mapping which brain regions respond to specific olfactory receptors. He holds several positions at Columbia University: University Professor, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and Professor of Pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Beyond neurobiology, Axel made key contributions to immunology; his lab was among the first to connect HIV infection with the immunoreceptor CD4. As a mentor, he has trained many leading scientists: seven of his former trainees have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and six are currently involved with Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and early scientist award programs.