Linda Buck shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on smell. It was not immediately clear how important the retracted research, done in mice, was to the body of work that led to her Nobel.

Buck and her co-authors said that apart from being unable to reproduce the reported results, they'd found inconsistencies between the published 2001 paper and the original data on which it was based.

The paper reported details of how the nervous system of the mouse carries odor signals from the nose to a particular region of the brain.

Buck shared the Nobel Prize with Richard Axel of Columbia University. They were honored for discovering odor-sensing proteins in the nose and tracing how the nervous system delivers odor information to the brain.