David Julius · Science & Medicine
Awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering receptors for temperature and touch
1955, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York, USA
United States (UC San Francisco)
David Julius is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering receptors for temperature and touch
Origins and early life
David Jay Julius was born on 4 November 1955 in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Russia, and went to Abraham Lincoln High School there. He took his first degree at MIT in 1977 and a doctorate at Berkeley in 1984, and joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, in 1989.
Work and career
His method was to let nature name the question. Chili peppers burn; why should a plant compound feel like heat? In 1997 his laboratory cloned the receptor that capsaicin acts on, and found that the same receptor — TRPV1 — is what the body uses to detect scalding temperature. The burn is not a metaphor: the pepper opens the channel that heat opens. He then did the same with menthol and cold, identifying TRPM8. Between them, the two receptors explained how a nerve ending turns temperature into an electrical signal, and gave pain research a molecular target where it had had none.
He won the Shaw Prize in 2010 and the Breakthrough Prize in 2020, and shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2021 with Ardem Patapoutian.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biomedical Science
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Awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering receptors for temperature and touch
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biomedical Science
