OREANDA-NEWS. The Nobel Committee awarded the 2021 Medicine Prize to scientists David Julius and Ardem Pataputyan, who studied how living organisms feel temperature.

They received an award for studying the reactions of living organisms to temperature and touch.

"Scientists have become laureates for their discoveries in the study of tactile and thermoceptors," the committee said.

They once discovered receptor molecules that trigger biochemical reactions that lead to sensations of heat, cold or touch.

Julius was born in 1955 in New York, received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently moved to San Francisco, where he still works.

Pataputian, in turn, was born in 1967 in the Lebanese capital Beirut and then moved to Los Angeles. There he defended his dissertation at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The scientist now works at the American non-profit medical and research center Scripps Research in La Jolla, California.

The amount of the prize money this year will be 10 million Swedish kronor (about 1 million dollars).

The awards will be presented on December 10, the birthday of the Swedish chemist and founder of the Alfred Nobel Prize. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony will take place online.