The Nobel Committee in Stockholm announced the names of the winners of the prize in medicine or physiology. They were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. They discovered how temperature or touch, for example, are transformed into human sensations.
The award ceremony took place remotely and was broadcast on the Nobel Committee’s website. The opening of Julius and Pataputyan was considered groundbreaking by the Nobel Committee. “This year’s laureates have enabled us to understand how temperature or mechanical force initiate nerve impulses that enable us to perceive the world and adapt,” the committee said. This technology has potential applications in fields ranging from medicine to virtual reality and robotics.
According to Professor Juli Zirat, a member of the Nobel Assembly, the medical prize is awarded “according to very specific criteria. “We were looking for a breakthrough that would open doors and help us see the problem in a new light,” she says. “The level of innovation has to be very high. It cannot be an invention or an improvement of something that already exists. It has to be a real breakthrough,” she added in an interview before the awards ceremony.
Due to the pandemic, the award was presented remotely this year. Born in 1955, Julius works at the University of California at San Francisco and has spent the last few decades studying the molecular mechanisms that help humans experience touch and pain. Under his leadership, a group of scientists has identified an entire family of temperature-sensitive receptors that allow nerve fibers to detect high and low temperatures by exploiting the properties of natural products, particularly hot peppers.
David Julius Artem Pataputyan was born in 1967 in Beirut, Lebanon. He also works in California at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His laboratory has identified and described ion channels that are activated by changes in thermal energy, acting as molecular thermometers of the human body.
“We explain quickly, simply and clearly what happened, why it matters and what will happen next.” The number of episodes should remain the same. End of story: Advertising in Podcasts Nikolay Voronin, BBC Science Correspondent.
Imagine you’ve decided to take a barefoot walk through the morning field and you’re walking on cool, swollen grass covered in dew… Stop! How do you know the grass is cool? That it is covered in dew? We are so used to trusting our senses that we rarely think about how they work. It is not difficult to feel the difference between a cold and a hot object, or between something solid and something soft (scientists call this ability somatosensation), even with our eyes closed. But how we do it – what mechanism underlies these sensations – science could not explain for thousands of years.
As early as the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes suggested that since we feel burning and pain when fire touches our skin, it must somehow be connected to the brain to transmit the appropriate signal. At the end of the 19th century, sensitive points on the skin were discovered that reacted to various irritants, but again, the reasons and mechanisms behind this phenomenon remained a mystery.
In 1906, Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal received the Nobel Prize for describing the structure of the nervous system. In 1932, the prize was shared by Charles Sherrington and Edgar Adrian for “discoveries concerning the functions of nerve cells,” including somatosensory functions. Another 12 years later, in 1944, the prize was awarded to Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Spencer Gasser for describing the various functions that individual nerve fibers can perform.
Noticing that spicy foods cause the same reaction in the body as hot foods, David Julius proposed that the alkaloid capsaicin (which gives various types of peppers their spicy flavor) activates a specific segment of DNA – the same one that high temperature does. After investigating thousands of possibilities, he finally discovered the protein responsible for this reaction, which he named TRPV1. And then he found the second one – TRPV2, which responds to even higher temperatures. Both laureates discovered the protein responsible for the sensation of cold almost simultaneously in 2002.
But Ardèm Patapoutian was not so lucky with the protein responsible for the sensation of physical touch. The professor compiled a list of 72 genes – potential candidates for the role of tactile receptor – and began to switch them off one by one to see if the sense of touch disappeared. The required gene turned out to be the last one, number 72.
Scientists have discovered how the somatosensory system allows us to feel not only temperature and touch, but also pain and even the movement of our own bodies. Not surprisingly, the Nobel Committee’s decision states that the scientific work of the new laureates “has revealed one of the mysteries of nature, explaining at the molecular level our ability to perceive and interpret both the world around us and our own internal sensations.
This week, the Nobel Committee will announce the winners in four more fields. On Tuesday they will announce the winner in physics, on Wednesday in chemistry and on Thursday in literature. On October 11, they will announce the winners in economics. On Friday, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in the Norwegian capital. There are 329 candidates vying for the prize.