Touchy feely win
PremiumThe awards often come long after the work honoured is done, for it must undergo rigorous verification. Covid fighters could win someday, but not just yet
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The 2021 Nobel prize for Medicine was awarded to US-based David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch". Both these have been part of our covid conversations, but the award is for basic research of human sensation. Specifically, their work explains how exactly our nervous system senses heat, cold and tactile stimuli, which are readings that help us interpret and interact with our environment—both internal and external. A close understanding of how we convert sensations into electrical impulses that make us act, such as by flinching away from a hot object, is valuable physiological knowledge.
That could explain why covid breakthroughs, such as the invention of messenger-RNA vaccines that involved the kind of genetic-study advances that may soon give us gene-adapted therapies, didn’t win the honour. While the scientific world’s response to the pandemic has been impressive, Nobel juries are observed to prefer fundamental findings. Moreover, the awards often come long after the work honoured is done, for it must undergo rigorous verification. Covid fighters could win someday, but not just yet.
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