dr patapoutians work dr wood said were involved in so many processes that they made for difficult drug targetsits fascinating mechanistically dr wood said but i dont think it has much clinical relevance to treating painwho are the winnersimagecreditsandy huffakhoward hughes medical institutescripps researchepaefe via shutterstockdr patapoutian who is of armenian origin grew up in lebanon during the countrys long and calamitous civil war before fleeing to the united states with his brother in 1986 at age 18 needing to establish residency in california so that he could afford college dr patapoutian worked eclectic jobs for a year delivering pizzas and writing the weekly horoscopes for an armenian newspaperat ucla in the course of preparing to apply to medical school he joined a research laboratory so that the professor would write him a good recommendationi fell in love with doing basic research dr patapoutian said in an interview that changed the trajectory of my careerhe added in lebanon i didnt even know about scientists as a careerdr patapoutian said that he gravitated to studying the sense of touch and pain because those systems remained so mysterious when you find a field thats not well understood he said its a great opportunity to dig inimagecredituniversity of california san franciscoepa via shutterstockdr julius too became fixated on the question of how the bodys sensory receptors worked growing up in brighton beach brooklyn he said that he began considering a career in science while at nearby abraham lincoln high school where a former minor league baseball player turned physics teacher spoke to students about calculating the trajectory of a baseballhe was the person who made me think maybe i should do science dr julius saidas a graduate student at the university of california berkeley and later a postdoctoral scholar at columbia university he said he became interested in how magic mushrooms and lsd worked and more broadly in how things from nature interact with human receptorsno sensory system matters more to survival than pain he said and hardly any was as poorly understood so his lab began investigating the workings of a wide range of unpleasant natural substances toxins from tarantulas and coral snakes capsaicin from chili peppers and the chemicals that make horseradish and wasabi so pungentwho won the 2020 nobel prize in medicinedr harvey j alter michael houghton and charles m rice received the prize for their discovery of the hepatitis c virus the nobel committee said the three scientists had made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of liveswho else won a nobel prize in the sciences in 2021the nobel prize in physics on tuesday was awarded to syukuro manabe of princeton university klaus hasselmann of the max planck institute for meteorology in hamburg germany and giorgio parisi of the sapienza university of rome the committee said their work has been essential to understanding how earths climate is changing and how human behavior is influencing those changesthe nobel prize in chemistry was awarded on wednesday to