Moser, Edvard Ingjald << ING yahld >> and May-Britt, two Norwegian neuroscientists, won the 2014 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. A neuroscientist is a scientist who studies the brain and the rest of the nervous system. The Mosers won the prize for their discoveries about brain cells that enable animals, including humans, to navigate from one place to another. The Mosers shared the prize with the American-born British neuroscientist John O’Keefe.
May-Britt and Edvard Moser identified in rats a type of nerve cell that they called a grid cell. In their experiments, the Mosers discovered that grid cells, found in the brain, fired (initiated a nerve impulse) when the rat passed certain locations in a room. Such firings established a mental “grid” that helped the rat to move purposefully around the space. Later research showed how grid cells and another group of cells called place cells make it possible to determine position and enable animals to navigate their surroundings.
Edvard Moser was born on April 27, 1962, in Alesund, Norway. May-Britt Andreassen was born on Jan. 4, 1963, in Fosnavåg, on a coastal island north of Bergen. The two married as students at the University of Oslo in 1985. They each earned a Ph.D. degree in neurobiology there in 1995. Since 2007, Edvard and May-Britt Moser have been director and codirector of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for Neural Computation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
