How hot chilis got a Nobel for a Brooklyn-born prof
The 2021 Nobel Prize in medicine was jointly awarded Monday to two U.S. scientists, one a Brooklyn-born professor who used chili peppers to understand how the human body responds to heat — a process now being used to develop new treatments for a wide range of diseases.
David Julius, who works at the University of California-San Francisco, used two substances to identify a sensor in the skin’s nerve endings that responds to heat, according to the Nobel Committee and university officials. The first substance is capsaicin, the molecule in chili peppers that induces a burning sensation. The second is a group of chemicals underlying the pungency of wasabi and horseradish
Julius, 65, born and raised in Brighton Beach, will share the prestigious award with Lebanon-born neuroscientist Ardem Patapoutian, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla, Calif.
The pair is credited with solving “one of the great mysteries facing humanity,” and potentially opening new ways of treating chronic pain, heart disease and other health issues, the Nobel Committee said in a news release announcing the prestigious award.
Their combined work helped explain how heat, cold and touch can trigger signals in the nervous system that allow humans “to perceive and adapt to the world around us,” the panel said. Patapoutian’s contribution came from his use of pressure-sensitive cells to find a new class of sensors that respond to mechanical stimulation in the skin and internal organs.
“This really unlocks one of the secrets of nature,” Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Committee, said at the award ceremony in Stockholm. “It’s actually something that is crucial for our survival, so it’s a very important and profound discovery.”
Julius said he learned he was one of the winners early Monday as family members and colleagues watching the announcement from Sweden began “blowing up” his phone. He also explained how he and Patapoutian looked into the mechanics of things like touch and pain to identify the right question in their research.
“But the reason that we were able to do it is because we started looking at the natural world, in terms of natural products, and we asked how things that tickle our pain sensors work — you know, chemicals from plants that are used presumably for them to defend themselves,” he said.
“And we sort of did an end run around the problem by turning to some natural product pharmacology, and that’s how we did it.”
Julius attended Abraham Lincoln High School, whose alumni include Arthur Miller and Mel Brooks. He credits one of his teachers there, a former minor league baseball player named Herb Isaacson, for showing him how math and physics can be put to good use by solving “relevant” problems — like the equation of motion of a baseball, according to a 2010 autobiography on the Shaw Prize website.
“It was at this point that I considered a career in science,” Julius wrote.
He later earned degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California-Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University before settling at UCSF in 1989. He is now a professor and chairman of the university’s physiology department.
The Bay Area resident has spent much of his career pushing for new drugs that could treat pain without the side effects and addictive potential of opioid drugs.
“David’s work epitomizes the creativity, scientific rigor and courage needed to pursue the major unsolved mysteries of biology and achieve the surprising discoveries that ultimately lead to crucial advances in human health,” UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood said in a statement.
Patapoutian, born in 1963, was a young man when he moved from wartorn Beirut to Los Angeles and went on to study at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, according to the Nobel Committee. He’s been working at Scripps Research since 2000 and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2014.
The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine is the first to be announced this year and will be followed by awards in economics, peace, physics, chemistry and literature over the next several days.