Nobel Prize Awarded for Research About Temperature and Touch
The New York Times
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were honored for their discoveries about how heat, cold and touch can initiate signals in the nervous system.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly on Monday to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, two scientists whose work identifying how people sense heat, cold, touch and their own bodily movements has opened the door to the development of non-opioid painkillers.
Dr. Julius, a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, used a key ingredient in hot chili peppers to identify a protein on nerve cells that responds to uncomfortably hot temperatures.
Dr. Patapoutian, a molecular biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, led a team that, in poking individual cells with a tiny pipette, identified a receptor that responds to pressure, touch and the positioning of body parts.
