This week’s Wednesday’s Women in STEM Series features Linda Brown Buck, a biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004. Read on to see why she credits her parents’ support, who told her she had the ability to do anything she wants.
Buck grew up in Seattle, WA with her electrical engineer father, stay-at-home mom, and two sisters. As a child, she says she played with dolls but was also curious and often bored so she often embarked on new adventures. She was encouraged at an early age by her parents to always strive for more in her life.
“I was fortunate to have wonderfully supportive parents who told me that I had the ability to do anything I wanted with my life. They taught me to think independently and to be critical of my own ideas, and they urged me to do something worthwhile with my life, in my mother’s words, to ‘not settle for something mediocre’.”
Buck attended the University of Seattle for college where she majored in psychology. She wanted a career that helped people and thought she would become a psychologist but it was after taking a course in immunology that she decided she wanted to be a biologist. She received her PhD in immunology in 1980 from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Her research examined the olfactory process by attempting to trace how smells travel through the cells of our nose into the brain. Buck and her colleague, Richard Axel, worked with rat genes and identified a family of genes that code for more than 1000 odor receptors. This work was published in 1991 and earned her and Axel the Nobel Prize in 2004.
“As a woman in science, I sincerely hope that my receiving a Nobel Prize will send a message to young women everywhere that the doors are open to them and that they should follow their dreams.”