The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience
The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience will be awarded for outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the brain and nervous system, including molecular neuroscience, cellular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neurogenetics, developmental neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and related facets of the brain and nervous system.
Sten Grillner, Thomas Jessell and Pasko Rakic receive the first Kavli Prize in neuroscience from Crown Prince Haakon. (Photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen/Scanpix)Neuroscience
One of the strangest and most wondrous things in the universe is the wrinkled lump in every person’s head: the human brain. Weighing about three pounds for the average adult, within the brain are 100 billion neurons that give us the ability to see, smell and move, as well as think, weep, talk and read. Furthermore, all we experience and remember – in essence, every little thing that makes us who we are – is rooted in the neocortex, the seat of the "thinking" brain.
Understanding how such a miracle is possible is the vast mission of the relatively young field of neuroscience.
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The 2008 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience
was awarded jointly to Pasko Rakic, of the Yale University School of Medicine, US, Thomas Jessell, of Columbia University, US, and Sten Grillner, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who collectively have deciphered the basic mechanisms that govern the development and functioning of the networks of cells in the brain and spinal cord.
