Two California Scientists Win Nobel Prize For Showing How We React To Heat, Touch
Source: Los Angeles Times, David Keyton and Maria Cheng (Associated Press)
Photo: Nobel Committee member Patrik Ernfors, far right, explains the work of California scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday. (Jessica Gow/TT)
Two California scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for their discoveries of how the human body perceives temperature and touch, revelations that could lead to new ways of treating pain or even heart disease.
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian identified receptors in the skin that respond to heat and pressure. Their work is focused on the field of somatosensation, which explores the ability of specialized organs such as eyes, ears and skin to see, hear and feel.
“This really unlocks one of the secrets of nature,” Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Committee, said in announcing the winners in Stockholm. “It’s actually something that is crucial for our survival, so it’s a very important and profound discovery.”
The committee said Julius used capsaicin, the active component in chili peppers, to identify the nerve sensors that allow the skin to respond to heat.
Patapoutian, who was born in Lebanon and now works at Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla, found separate pressure-sensitive sensors in cells that respond to mechanical stimulation, the committee said.
“In our daily lives we take these sensations [of temperature and touch] for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived?” the committee wrote in the announcement. “This question has been solved by this year’s Nobel Prize Laureates.”
Julius, who was born in New York and now works at UC San Francisco, said he was awakened in the middle of the night in California by what he thought was a prank phone call shortly before the Nobel was announced.
“My phone sort of bleeped, and it was from a relative who had been contacted by somebody on the Nobel Committee trying to find my phone number,” he said from his home in San Francisco.
It was only when his wife heard Perlmann’s voice and confirmed that it was indeed the secretary-general of the Nobel Committee calling that he realized it wasn’t a joke. Julius said his wife had worked with Perlmann years ago.
Julius, 65, said he hoped his work would lead to the development of new pain drugs, noting that the biology behind even everyday activities can have enormous significance.
“We eat chili peppers and menthol, but oftentimes, you don’t think about how that works,” he said.
The choice of Julius and Patapoutian underscored how little scientists knew, before the pair’s discoveries, about how our bodies perceive the external world — and how much there still is to learn, said Oscar Marin, director of the MRC Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King’s College London.
“While we understood the physiology of the senses, what we didn’t understand was how we sensed differences in temperature or pressure,” Marin said. “Knowing how our body senses these changes is fundamental because once we know those molecules, they can be targeted. It’s like finding a lock, and now we know the precise keys that will be necessary to unlock it.”
Marin said that the discoveries opened up “an entire field of pharmacology” and that researchers were already working to develop drugs to target the receptors they identified.
Marin predicted that new treatments for pain would likely come first, but knowing how the body detects changes in pressure could eventually lead to drugs for heart disease, if scientists can figure out how to alleviate pressure on blood vessels and other organs.