Americans Julius and Patbutian win Nobel Prize for Medicine

 American scientists David Julius and Arderm Patbutian have won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their discoveries in the field of heat and touch receptors, the award committee in Stockholm announced Monday.

The prize consists of a gold medal and 10 million Swedish crowns, which is equivalent to more than 1.14 million dollars.

The selection of the American scientists who won the award this year is contrary to expectations, which were speculating that this important award would be given to scientists involved in finding vaccines against the emerging corona virus, which greatly helped the world recover from that pandemic.

"The groundbreaking discoveries of this year's Nobel Prize winners have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can stimulate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world," the committee said on the Nobel Prize's official website.

According to the New York Times, Julius and Patabotian found that they determined how people feel heat, cold, touch and their bodily movements, opening the door to the development of non-opioid pain relievers.

The newspaper said that Dr. David Julius (65 years), a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, used the active ingredient capsaicin in hot peppers, which causes a burning sensation, to monitor the presence of a receptor in the skin nerve endings that reacts to high temperatures.

Julius is an American physiologist known for his work on the molecular mechanisms underlying the discovery of heat stimuli and natural products. He previously won the 2010 Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine.

As for Arderm Patbutian, an American scientist of Lebanese-Armenian descent, born in Beirut in 1967, he is a professor at the Scripps Research Institute in California. He used pressure-sensitive cells to discover a new class of receptors that interact with mechanical stimuli in the skin and internal organs.

And the names of many other scientists have been circulated to win the Nobel Prize this year, including pioneers in research related to vaccines against the Corona virus with messenger RNA technology (mRNA), research related to the work of the immune system, and experts in cell adhesion or in the science of levitation.

Last year, the award went to 3 scientists who discovered the liver-damaging hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough that led to treatments for the deadly disease and tests to prevent the spread of the epidemic.