Norwegian Nobel Winners Release Their Inner Avant-Garde Musicians
Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine repurposed a Norse folk tune for a science lecture
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Edvard and May-Britt Moser, both Norwegian professors and Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine, ended a Nobel lecture they gave yesterday with an odd performance: a music video they created to mark the occasion.
The music video features colleagues from their university, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, improvising a Norwegian folk tune, the university reports. Rather than use the traditional lyrics, the musicians created "jazz poetry" based on the scientists' prize-winning research. They also overlaid images of the researchers' subjects: neurons and grid cells.
May-Britt Moser said she aimed for the music video to deliver a final "wow" feeling at the end of her and her husband-slash-co-researcher's presentations. "I hope we have managed to create exactly that kind of ending," she said.
The Mosers, along with their mentor John O'Keefe, shared the Nobel earlier this year for their joint discovery of grid cells and place cells in the brain, responsible for giving us a sense of place and direction.
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