The 2021 Nobel Prize for medicine helps unravel mysteries about how the body senses temperature and pressure

The Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s prize in medicine to two scientists who have advanced our understanding of this detection process for “somatosensation,” the sense responsible for the perceptions of touch, temperature, vibration, pain and proprioception – the body’s ability to sense its own movements and position in space.

On Oct. 4, 2021, David Julius, a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Scripps Research, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work identifying proteins that the body uses to detect temperature and pressure.

The work of Julius and Patapoutian has greatly expanded scientists’ views of how the nervous system deciphers the external and internal world by introducing us to entirely new classes of sensory receptors.