Richard Axel

Richard Axel, born on 2 July 1946 in New York City, is an American molecular biologist and university professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, and was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He grew up in Brooklyn, took his bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1967 and his medical degree at Johns Hopkins in 1971, and returned to Columbia, where he became a full professor in 1978. In the late 1970s he worked with Saul Silverstein and Michael Wigler on cotransformation by transfection, a technique that lets foreign DNA enter a host cell so that it makes particular proteins; the patents on it earned Columbia very large licensing income. His main research interest is how the brain interprets the sense of smell, mapping the brain regions that respond to specific olfactory receptors. That work won him and Linda Buck, a former postdoctoral researcher in his group, the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In February 2026 he resigned as co-director of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute over his past association with Jeffrey Epstein.