Nobel Prize-winner will head to Max Planck in Florida

The Max Planck Society has recruited a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to become the science director of its new research center in Palm Beach County, Florida. Dr. Bert Sakmann won the Nobel Price for physiology and medicine in 1991 and has plans to develop a three-dimensional atlas of the brain that can used to advance new approaches to curing Alzheimer's and other degerative diseases.

Sakmann and his researchers--who he's recruiting now--will create a three-dimensional atlas of nerve cell bodies, dendrites and axons by first labeling the different cell types with specific fluorescent markers and then imaging and quantifying the neuron distributions to create a three-dimensional map of the normal brain.

"The research will not only help further our basic understanding of the degenerative disease process, but could also serve as a platform to measure the beneficial changes caused by novel therapeutic approaches such as new drugs and stem cell therapy," the institute said. Sakmann currently works at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich.

Florida and Palm Beach County have divvied up the costs for the $188 million research facility, which will occupy 100,000 square feet of space when the center opens in 2011.

- check out the press release
- read the report from the Palm Beach Post