2 Americans Win Nobel Prize on Medicine

On Monday, American scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of temperature and touch receptors in the skin, which could pave the way for novel painkillers.

Their independent research has contributed to understanding how humans turn physical stimuli like as heat or touch into nerve impulses that allow us to "perceive and adapt to the world around us," according to the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.

"This knowledge is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of disease conditions, including chronic pain."

Patapoutian, who was born in Lebanon in 1967 to Armenian parents and grew up in Los Angeles, learned of the news through his father, who had been unable to contact him by phone.

"In science many times it is the things we take for granted that are of high interest," he said of receiving the prize, which is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.15 million).

He is credited with discovering the celular mechanism and the gene that converts a mechanical stress on our skin into an electric nerve signal.

"For us being in the field of sense, touch and pain, this was the big elephant in room where we knew they existed, we knew they did something very different," he said.

Patapoutian is a professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, after working at the University of California, San Francisco, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Julius, who was born in New York and previously worked at Columbia University in New York, is a Professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

According to the commission, the laureates for 2021 were caught off guard.

"They were incredibly happy and as far as I could tell very surprised and a little bit shocked," said Professor Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General for the Nobel Assembly and the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

In the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel, the famed Nobel prizes for achievements in science, literature, and peace were established and supported. They've been given out since 1901, with the economics prize being given out for the first time in 1969.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, which the two laureates received equally this year, is frequently overshadowed by the Nobel Prizes for Literature and Peace, and its sometimes more well-known recipients.

However, the COVID-19 Pandemic has brought medicine into the forefront, and some experts have indicated that people who create coronavirus vaccinations should be rewarded this year or in the following years.

The pandemic is still looming over the Nobel Prize ceremonies, which are usually filled with old-world pomp and glitz. The banquet in Stockholm has been rescheduled for the second year in a row due to continuing concerns about the virus and foreign travel.