Edvard Moser on the Nobel Prize

DW: First, congratulations! What where your initial thoughts after you received the news that you had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine?

Edvard Moser: [I got off a] plane in Munich and there was a representative from the airport waiting for me with flowers and with one of these airport cars. I didn't understand what had happened. The person told me that I had won the prize. I asked: "What prize?" Only after checking my phone did I realized there had been hundreds of calls, messages and emails while I was on the plane. There was one from the secretary of the Nobel committee. I knew this could mean one of two things: either he wanted a comment on this year's Nobel Prize, or I had won the prize myself, maybe with [my wife] May-Britt and John [O'Keefe of University College London]. Then, Tobias Bonhoeffer, my host here at the Max Planck Institute, called me and I realized what had happened. But it still took me a minute. It wasn't on my mind at all. Of course I expected this could happen one day, but maybe when I was seventy or eighty. It was faster then I had expected. In brain sciences it takes a while to find out whether a discovery is important or not. The Nobel committee has often been very conservative. They want to wait and see before they decide something is important. But in this case I am happy they made up their minds so early.

What's it like working with your wife, May-Britt Moser - do you ever stop discussing your research?

Yes, of course, we don't discuss it all the time, not at all. There are just no time boundaries, it's not something we do from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. - we talk about things when it feels natural, which can be at any time. But there are times when we don't talk about science at all. We've found our own equilibrium.

But it is true that your daughter once said that you talk about the lab as if it were your third child?

In a way, it is true. It is something we built up from scratch. When we got our positions in Trondheim 1996, what we got was literally an empty room in the basement. This is where we built up the first lab. There was nothing, no infrastructure. Neuroscience wasn't even a part of that institute. Since then it has grown constantly - over a period of twenty years - and now it is a big institute with many groups. We feel really attached to it. So you could call it a third child.

What applications are there for your research in modern medicine?

First, it is important to note that the research we do is basic research. We don't necessarily know what the applications will be. But it is not difficult to see how it could be applied to Alzheimer's disease. This disease starts in the same brain area that contains the cells we discovered, which are so important for orientation. That is probably the reason why one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease is that you get lost and you can not find your way. I think, understanding how cells in this region of the brain work is necessary for diagnosing Alzheimer's at an early stage. We need to understand what is going wrong and how to treat it. There are other applications, but since this is basic research we try to understand how the brain works in general. We may actually find principles that are important for any kind of brain operation or disease in neurology and psychiatry. It may extend far beyond Alzheimer's, but that is far off.

How will you invest the money attached to the Nobel Prize?

I have no idea. I haven't even thought about that. I don't even know how much it is.

What are the next steps in your research?

We will continue as we have started. One of the things we really want to determine is how these grid patterns, these hexagonal patterns, arise in the brain. It is something that is made by the brain itself, so the brain itself makes its own coordinate system. If we can find out how that works, we will be at the core of some of the really fundamental competences of the brain. Another thing is the many types of specialized cells. We have the grid cells that provide a coordinate system, or a "GPS" in the brain, the place cells that tie it to memory and the border cells that characterize boundaries. Additionally we have directional cells and speed cells. All of these cells work together to create the feeling of where you are. One of our really important goals is to find out how they work together and what makes us get the feeling of where we are at any given moment. We know that there are many cells that have specialized roles but we don't know yet how they collaborate.

Edvard Moser was jointly awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, with his wife May-Britt Moser and John O'Keefe. The Mosers are based at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and the Centre for Neural Computation in Trondheim, respectively, and O'Keefe is based at University College London.