Visiting Nobel winner pondering life’s burning questions

How do we think and why are we self-aware? Why do we need to sleep, and why do we grow old and die?

Those are some of the big, burning questions a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, visiting New Zealand this week, says he would love to see answered in his lifetime.

“Many, many questions linger in biology, some of them quite obvious,” said Professor Bruce Beutler, who opened Queenstown Research Week, an annual summit of hundreds of leading Kiwi scientists.

Beutler, currently the director of the University of Texas Southwestern’s Centre for the Genetics of Host Defence, jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2011 for a breakthrough that changed the course of immunology.

This work revealed an important family of receptors that allow mammals to sense infections when they occur, triggering a powerful inflammatory response.

Beutler achieved this by cloning mutations to discover how what are called “Toll-like receptors”, or TLRs, act as molecular sensors of infection.

The immunologist and geneticist is also revered for having laid the foundation for a widely used treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases.

He and his colleagues try to learn more about immunity and other important biological processes through studying mice.

“We do this by making abnormalities — for example, immune deficiencies — using a randomly acting chemi- cal mutagen,” Beutler told the Herald.

“That way we can identify those genes that are essential for normal immune function.”

By revealing these genes, scientists could gain a clear impression of how immunity normally operates in both mice and in humans.

“We would like to understand living things as one might understand . . . a machine of human construction.”