Linda B. Buck

Linda B. Buck was born to a daughter of Swedish immigrants and an electrical engineer in 1947. As a child, she used to go on independent expeditions to satisfy her curiosity and boredom. Buck’s parents taught her how to find beauty in music and in nature and how to use building as a creative outlet and manage various tools. Buck’s inspiration to become a scientist came from her parent’s encouragement; they always told her that she could do anything and to make the most out of her career. Before Buck had decided that she wanted to pursue biology, she wanted to be a psychotherapist, a career that would help others. She went to the University of Washington for psychology, but her interests changed and she considered careers other than psychotherapy. Proceeding a fascinating course that Buck had taken on

She focused on figuring out why major histocompatability proteins were required for immune reactions. According to her biographical on nobelprize.org, she found out that, “the MHC proteins rapidly accumulated inside these cells when they were activated.” This means that when the immune system was stimulated, the major histocompatability proteins gathered inside the cells. From this crucial piece of information, Linda drew that the endocytosed proteins from the cell walls were being recycled. She knew that antigen, any substance that forces the immense system to make antibodies against, is drawn into the cell accompanied by a B-cell anchored antibody and then broken down. According to the text, “One possibility raised by the internalization and apparent recycling of MHC molecules was that, following internalization, they might be targeted to a specialized microenvironment where they could interact with degraded antigen. The MHC-antigen complexes might then be exported to the cell surface for corecognition by T helper