PROFILES IN SCIENCE
A Sense of Where You Are
Brian Cliff Olguin for The New York Times
By JAMES GORMAN
Published: April 30, 2013
TRONDHEIM, Norway - In 1988, two determined psychology students sat in the office of an internationally renowned neuroscientist in Oslo and explained to him why they had to study with him.
Unfortunately, the researcher, Per Oskar Andersen, was hesitant, May-Britt Moser said as she and her husband, Edvard I. Moser, now themselves internationally recognized neuroscientists, recalled the conversation recently. He was researching physiology and they were interested in the intersection of behavior and physiology. But, she said, they wouldn't take no for an answer.
"We sat there for hours. He really couldn't get us out of his office," Dr. May-Britt Moser said.
"Both of us come from nonacademic families and nonacademic places," Edvard said. "The places where we grew up, there was no one with any university education, no one to ask. There was no recipe on how to do these things."
"And how to act politely," May-Britt interjected.
"It was just a way to get to the point where we wanted to be. But seen now, when I know the way people normally do it," he said, smiling at the memory of his younger self, "I'm quite impressed."
So, apparently, was Dr. Andersen. In the end, he yielded to the Mosers' combination of furious curiosity and unwavering determination and took them on as graduate students.
They have impressed more than a few people since. In 2005, they and their colleagues reported the discovery of cells in rats' brains that function as a kind of built-in navigation system that is at the very heart of how animals know where they are, where they are going and where they have been. They called them grid cells.
"I admire their work tremendously," said Eric Kandel, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist who heads the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia and who has followed the Mosers' careers since they were graduate students./.../
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