Quote of the day

“While we understood the physiology of the senses, what we didn’t understand was how we sensed differences in temperature or pressure. Knowing how our body senses these changes is fundamental because once we know those molecules, they can be targeted. It’s like finding a lock, and now we know the precise keys that will be necessary to unlock it.”

Oscar Marin: director of the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King’s College London, on the discoveries by David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian — winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine — who separately identified receptors in the skin that respond to heat and pressure.