Medicine Prize:

The 2021 Nobel science prizes
Two students of the senses win the Nobel prize for medicine
They found the mechanisms of touch and temperature sensitivity

Oct 4th 2021

THE IDEA that there are five senses goes back at least as far as Aristotle. But it is not quite true. Four of the senses are obvious, not least because each is associated with a particular organ: sight with the eyes, hearing with the ears, taste with the tongue and smell with the nose. But the fifth classical sense, touch, is distributed over the whole surface of the body, albeit that it is particularly concentrated in the fingertips.

Touch, moreover, is only one of such distributed senses. Others, perceived consciously, include pain, heat and cold. And modern science has shown there are yet further, unconsciously perceived senses, known collectively as proprioception. These keep track of the position and movement of the body and its parts. This year, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, which awards the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, chose to honour the discoverers of the molecular mechanisms of two of these distributed senses—temperature and mechanical stimulation.

The winners were David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco and Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research, a biomedical institute in San Diego. Dr Julius did the pioneering work on temperature. He and Dr Patapoutian, acting independently, then advanced this work. After that, Dr Patapoutian moved on to look at mechanical stimulation.

Dr Julius’s chosen tool for his investigation, which he began in the late 1990s, was capsaicin. This is the active ingredient of chilli peppers. By a chemical coincidence (as was then assumed and is now known) capsaicin reacts with, and thus stimulates, one of the body’s heat-receptor proteins. Dr Julius set out to discover what this protein was. To do so he made millions of fragments of genetic material for proteins known to be active in heat-receptor cells. He then introduced these fragments into other cells, to encourage them to manufacture the relevant protein fragments. That done, he tested the modified cells for sensitivity to capsaicin.

The fragments which induced capsaicin sensitivity turned out to be parts of a protein now called TRPV1. This belongs to a class of proteins called ion channels, which do many jobs in the body. As predicted, TRPV1 turned out to be heat sensitive. When the temperature rises above 43°C, the channel through it opens, permitting ions of calcium and sodium to pass. That chemical signal stimulates a nerve impulse which tells the brain about the temperature change.

TRPV1 turned out to be one of several temperature-sensitive ion channels, some of which register heat, and some cold. It was one of the cold-sensitive varieties, TRPM8, which was discovered simultaneously by Dr Julius and Dr Patapoutian.

Dr Patapoutian then went on to look at the sensation of touch. Molecular biology having advanced in the interim, he was able to work with whole proteins—or, rather, the genes for whole proteins. He identified 72 such proteins expressed in a mechanically sensitive cell line that looked like potential touch-sensitive sensitive ion channels. He tested them one at a time, by silencing the genes that encode them and poking the resulting cells. The first 71 silencings had no effect. But the 72nd proved to be of the protein he was looking for. He called that protein PIEZO1.

In nature, PIEZO1 is found not in sensory neurons, but rather in organs like the bladder where local sensitivity to pressure is important. But Dr Patapoutian soon discovered a second, similar channel, PIEZO2, which is, indeed, found in nerve endings. It is this that is responsible for touch and proprioception.

Fascinating work, then. And important. It is through the senses, and the senses alone, that human beings are able to perceive the world. But to some people the award has come as a surprise. In a year of covid, many had been expecting the honours to go elsewhere—perhaps to the inventors of mRNA-vaccine technology. Like God, however, the various Nobel-prize committees work in mysterious ways their wonders to perform.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/two-students-of-the-senses-win-the-nobel-prize-for-medicine/21805250?

Witty Rejoinder said:

Medicine Prize:

The 2021 Nobel science prizes
Two students of the senses win the Nobel prize for medicine
They found the mechanisms of touch and temperature sensitivity

Oct 4th 2021

THE IDEA that there are five senses goes back at least as far as Aristotle. But it is not quite true. Four of the senses are obvious, not least because each is associated with a particular organ: sight with the eyes, hearing with the ears, taste with the tongue and smell with the nose. But the fifth classical sense, touch, is distributed over the whole surface of the body, albeit that it is particularly concentrated in the fingertips.

Touch, moreover, is only one of such distributed senses. Others, perceived consciously, include pain, heat and cold. And modern science has shown there are yet further, unconsciously perceived senses, known collectively as proprioception. These keep track of the position and movement of the body and its parts. This year, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, which awards the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, chose to honour the discoverers of the molecular mechanisms of two of these distributed senses—temperature and mechanical stimulation.

The winners were David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco and Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research, a biomedical institute in San Diego. Dr Julius did the pioneering work on temperature. He and Dr Patapoutian, acting independently, then advanced this work. After that, Dr Patapoutian moved on to look at mechanical stimulation.

Dr Julius’s chosen tool for his investigation, which he began in the late 1990s, was capsaicin. This is the active ingredient of chilli peppers. By a chemical coincidence (as was then assumed and is now known) capsaicin reacts with, and thus stimulates, one of the body’s heat-receptor proteins. Dr Julius set out to discover what this protein was. To do so he made millions of fragments of genetic material for proteins known to be active in heat-receptor cells. He then introduced these fragments into other cells, to encourage them to manufacture the relevant protein fragments. That done, he tested the modified cells for sensitivity to capsaicin.

The fragments which induced capsaicin sensitivity turned out to be parts of a protein now called TRPV1. This belongs to a class of proteins called ion channels, which do many jobs in the body. As predicted, TRPV1 turned out to be heat sensitive. When the temperature rises above 43°C, the channel through it opens, permitting ions of calcium and sodium to pass. That chemical signal stimulates a nerve impulse which tells the brain about the temperature change.

TRPV1 turned out to be one of several temperature-sensitive ion channels, some of which register heat, and some cold. It was one of the cold-sensitive varieties, TRPM8, which was discovered simultaneously by Dr Julius and Dr Patapoutian.

Dr Patapoutian then went on to look at the sensation of touch. Molecular biology having advanced in the interim, he was able to work with whole proteins—or, rather, the genes for whole proteins. He identified 72 such proteins expressed in a mechanically sensitive cell line that looked like potential touch-sensitive sensitive ion channels. He tested them one at a time, by silencing the genes that encode them and poking the resulting cells. The first 71 silencings had no effect. But the 72nd proved to be of the protein he was looking for. He called that protein PIEZO1.

In nature, PIEZO1 is found not in sensory neurons, but rather in organs like the bladder where local sensitivity to pressure is important. But Dr Patapoutian soon discovered a second, similar channel, PIEZO2, which is, indeed, found in nerve endings. It is this that is responsible for touch and proprioception.

Fascinating work, then. And important. It is through the senses, and the senses alone, that human beings are able to perceive the world. But to some people the award has come as a surprise. In a year of covid, many had been expecting the honours to go elsewhere—perhaps to the inventors of mRNA-vaccine technology. Like God, however, the various Nobel-prize committees work in mysterious ways their wonders to perform.

Goodness, that took a long time to be recognized. I seem to remember the heat/capsaicin connection from quite a long time ago. Mind you, I’m not very good at time estimation.

Well that’s good

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists who have made significant contributions to our understanding of climate science.

Syukuro Manabe, 90, from the US, and Klaus Hasselmann, 89, from Germany, were cited for their work in “the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.

The second half of the prize was awarded to Italian Giorgio Parisi, 73, for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.

The winners will share more than $1.5 million in prize money.

Nobel prizes in chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be awarded throughout the week.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-05/nobel-prize-physics-awarded-to-three-climate-scientists/100516424

Michael V said:

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists who have made significant contributions to our understanding of climate science.

Syukuro Manabe, 90, from the US, and Klaus Hasselmann, 89, from Germany, were cited for their work in “the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.

The second half of the prize was awarded to Italian Giorgio Parisi, 73, for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.

The winners will share more than $1.5 million in prize money.

Nobel prizes in chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be awarded throughout the week.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-05/nobel-prize-physics-awarded-to-three-climate-scientists/100516424

Good

This year’s Nobel physics laureates have made sense of complexity
They have modelled both the climate and some strange materials

Oct 5th 2021

THE NATURAL world is filled with complexity. The more closely scientists study everything from planets to atoms, the more structure they find and the more detailed their explanations must get. But if you want to predict the behaviour of such systems, how much detail do you need? To understand how Earth’s oceans will behave, say, do you need to track every individual molecule of water within them?

This year’s Nobel prize for physics was awarded to a trio of researchers who have studied complex, chaotic and apparently random systems and developed ways to predict their long-term behaviour. Half of the prize of SKr10m (about $1.1m) was shared by Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg. The other half went to Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University, in Rome.

Drs Manabe and Hasselmann laid the foundations of the modelling of the Earth’s climate that led to “quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”, according to the citation by the Nobel Committee for Physics of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science. Dr Parisi was awarded his share for his discoveries around the “interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.

In the 1960s, Dr Manabe, an atmospheric scientist, wove together emerging strands of understanding of the dynamics and thermodynamics of Earth’s atmosphere to make the first reliable prediction that doubling the level of carbon dioxide present would also increase the planet’s surface temperature. His work led to the development of physical models of Earth’s climate and laid the foundation for the climate models used today.

Around the same time, scientists such as Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were beginning to describe weather as a chaotic system—in other words, something that had so many interacting individual components, such as temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed, that even small variations in initial conditions could result in enormous differences at a later stage. In this description, weather evolved rapidly and became essentially unpredictable even just a few days into the future.

In the 1970s, Dr Hasselmann developed models to show how weather, despite itself being chaotic and unpredictable in the short-term, could nonetheless yield reliable models to predict Earth’s climate over much longer periods. In describing his work he made an analogy to Brownian motion, the jostling movement of pollen grains in water that was first observed down a microscope by Robert Brown, a botanist, in 1827. Almost 80 years later, Albert Einstein posited that the slow zigzagging of the grains could be explained by their continual bombardment much tinier, fast-moving water molecules. The large-scale climate can similarly be seen as a consequence of numerous much smaller events.

Around 1980 Dr Parisi found some of the rules that govern apparently random phenomena. He studied a type of material called “spin glass”, in which, for example, iron atoms are mixed randomly into a grid of copper atoms. The iron atoms each behave as tiny magnets but, unlike the case of a normal lump of magnetised metal, the north-south poles of the iron atoms in a spin glass do not point in a uniform direction. Dr Parisi devised a way to understand how they find their optimal orientations. His mathematical ideas not only help explain some of the complex systems of Earth’s climate, as described by his two fellow laureates, but also other apparently random phenomena in fields as diverse as biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

This year’s physics prize is the first scientific Nobel to be awarded for understanding the Earth’s climate. Asked if this was a not-so-subtle message to world leaders ahead of the upcoming cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, members of the Nobel committee said the prize was meant to celebrate the discoveries themselves. But, they added, it also showed that the modelling of climate and the notion of global warming rested on solid physical science. Human beings can no longer say they did not know how or why Earth was heating up.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/this-years-nobel-physics-laureates-have-made-sense-of-complexity/21805259?

Two scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for finding an “ingenious” new way to build molecules that can be used to make everything from medicines to food flavourings.

The pair each independently developed the asymmetric organocatalysis tool.

The tool is both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.

Benjamin List of Germany and Scotland-born David W.C. MacMillan developed “asymmetric organocatalysis” — a tool that had made chemistry “greener”, the judges said.

“Organic catalysts can be used to drive multitudes of chemical reactions,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

“Using these reactions, researchers can now more efficiently construct anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells.”

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-06/nobel-prize-for-chemistry-molecule/100519658

Michael V said:

Two scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for finding an “ingenious” new way to build molecules that can be used to make everything from medicines to food flavourings.

The pair each independently developed the asymmetric organocatalysis tool.

The tool is both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.

Benjamin List of Germany and Scotland-born David W.C. MacMillan developed “asymmetric organocatalysis” — a tool that had made chemistry “greener”, the judges said.

“Organic catalysts can be used to drive multitudes of chemical reactions,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

“Using these reactions, researchers can now more efficiently construct anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells.”

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-06/nobel-prize-for-chemistry-molecule/100519658

Good on them.

“Two journalists whose work has angered the authorities in Russia and the Philippines have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, honouring the right to free speech which the prize-giving committee described as under threat around the globe.

The pair were announced as the winners on Friday in Oslo.

“Ms Ressa and Mr Muratov are receiving the Peace Prize for their courageous fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines and Russia,” chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen of the Norwegian Nobel Committee told a news conference.

“At the same time, they are representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions.

“Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda.”“

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-08/maria-ressa-and-dmitry-muratov-win-2021-nobel-peace-prize/100526074

Economists David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens have won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for pioneering “natural experiments” to show real-world impacts of government policies such as minimum wage increases in the US fast-food sector and migration from Castro-era Cuba.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-12/nobel-prize-economics-2021-winners/100531188