Charles Zuker

Origins and early life

Charles Zuker was born on 27 June 1957 in Arica, in the far north of Chile near the borders of Peru and Bolivia, the second of four children of a prominent businessman and a homemaker. In an oral history recorded for the Pew Scholars programme between 1992 and 1994 he spoke of grandparents who had come to South America to escape antisemitism and of the Jewish community of Arica, and its summary records that, although Jewish, he attended Jesuit schools, which his parents judged the best education in Chile.

The family moved to Santiago while he was in high school, and from the age of sixteen he studied at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, where scarce funds taught him to build his own equipment.

Work and career

He earned a doctorate at MIT in 1983 under Harvey Lodish, studied the light-sensing cells of the fruit fly at Berkeley with Gerald Rubin, and joined the University of California, San Diego, in 1986. He became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1989 and moved to Columbia University in 2009. From the late 1990s, with Nick Ryba at the National Institutes of Health, his laboratory identified the cells and receptors behind the five basic tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, each carried by its own class of cells.

When his team put bitter receptors into the cells that sense sweetness, mice were drawn to bitter compounds instead of avoiding them, showing that what we taste depends on which cells fire and how they are wired to the brain. He went on to show that each taste has its own field in the cortex, and that sugar and fat also signal the brain from the gut, which may be why artificial sweeteners do not satisfy a craving for sugar.

Recognition

In October 2026 the Wolf Foundation awarded him its prize in medicine for revolutionizing our understanding of taste, the last of our senses to be elucidated, to be presented at the Knesset in June 2027.