Freshman Caucus Hosts Lecture by Nobel Prize Recipient Richard Axel

Nobel Prize winner and Stuyvesant High School Alumnus Dr. Richard Axel (‘63) spoke to students about his research on the olfactory system in Lecture Hall A on Thursday, March 29. The event was the fourth Freshman Caucus-hosted lecture this school year.

Axel is a university professor and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University Medical Center, as well as a member of the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the Neuroscience and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. In 2004, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries on how the olfactory system affects learning in the brain.

Axel started the lecture, titled “Order from Disorder: Internal Representations of the Olfactory World,” by describing his childhood and the start of his career in science. Axel was initially a geneticist, and studied different genes to determine how they control certain properties of cells. By using his research observations, he concluded that groups of neurons controlled behavior rather than genes.

Axel proceeded to use an example of how the brain interprets paintings to discuss how neurons influence the brain. He showed two different paintings of the same scene of Adam and Eve, but one was created by Lucas Cranach and was full of details, while another was created by Barnett Newman and made of lines. “[The Newman painting] consists of lines, forms, colors, that depict the scene but have no basis in reality,” Axel said. “This painting is an abstraction, and meaning must by imposed upon the abstraction by experience. [...] The brain depicts the world - it depicts more than the world, it depicts perception, motion, cognition, memory, [as is the role] of active neurons.”

Axel then explained how the brain works in a similar fashion for the olfactory system. “All organisms have a mechanism to recognize olfactory information in the environment and [process this information] to create an internal representation of the world,” he said. “This internal representation then translates [...] into a meaningful firing of neurons, to ultimately result in appropriate thoughts and behaviors.”

The lecture received a lot of positive feedback from the audience. “The most memorable was when Axel [discussed] the vast number of ways humans remember certain odors,” freshman Rebecca Kim said. “These lectures provide me with more insight regarding a scientist's work and research in the real world,” freshman Brian Zhang said.

Freshman Caucus Vice President Jonathan Schneiderman, who helped plan the lecture, shared the positive opinions. “When freshmen and other students are exposed to advanced ideas, it lets them expand their horizons. If they decide that they want to pursue one of those ideas as a career, that's really superb, and we've changed a life for the better,” he said.

Many students are looking forward to more lectures from the Freshman Caucus in the future. “I would appreciate more informative lectures like Axel's because it had left much of an impression on me and was able to provide insight into a topic that most teachers at school do not go into much detail to,” Kim said.