Winners of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Announced

Award recognizes research that explains how our nerves sense the environment around us. View in browser

Image credits: Abigail Malate, Staff Illustrator 2 Share Medicine Nobel for Discovering Receptors for Touch and Temperature Award recognizes research that explains how our nerves sense the environment around us. Haley Weiss, Staff Writer October 4, 2021                                                                                                                                                                                (Inside Science) -- The first Nobel Prize of 2021 has been awarded to two researchers for their work discovering receptors for temperature and touch. David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, were named this year's laureates for physiology or medicine this morning by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. The prizewinning work began in the late 1990s, when Julius began to investigate how the body receives signals from the chemical compound capsaicin, which is responsible for the heat we feel from hot peppers. His research led to the first discovery of a temperature-sensing receptor in the skin, named TRPV1, that prompts the nervous system signal we recognize as heat. In collaboration, Julius and Patapoutian were then able to identify a similar receptor, TRPM8, that is activated instead by cold... Read more Copyright 2021 American Institute of Physics. Inside Science syndicates its articles, columns, blogs and videos to news organizations. To initiate syndication, or request permission to republish our content (on a one-time or continuing basis), please contact Inside Science at insidescience@aip.org. News organizations seeking permission to republish Inside Science content must fully credit Inside Science as the original source of the content, include the author byline, and republish the original, unaltered form (excluding content titles, headlines, or sub-headlines). The reprint format can be seen here. Copyright conditions and usage terms are subject to change at any time without consent or any type of prior notice. To unsubscribe from all future mailings from Inside Science please click here. To manage your email subscriptions please click here.

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