2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 4 October 2021.

The citation

The citation reads: "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

David Julius was born in 1955 in New York, the United States, and is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco. Ardem Patapoutian was born in 1967 in Beirut, Lebanon, and is affiliated with the Scripps Research, La Jolla and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Why it matters

The two Americans discovered how nerves detect heat, cold and touch, including through the chemical in chilli peppers that makes them hot.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.