Today, 4 October 2021, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded jointly to Ardem Patapoutian and David Julius, from the USA. This was announced by the Nobel General Assembly, which convened remotely in Stockholm.
Prof. Dr. Ardem Patapoutian and his colleague David Julius received the Nobel Prize for their “discovery of receptors for temperature and touch,” in which they comprehensively studied how the human nervous system responds to hot, cold and mechanical stimuli.
It should be noted that Dr. Prof. Ardem Patapoutian, born in 1967 in Beirut, is the worthy son of the renowned intellectual and prose writer Sargis Vahagn (Patapoutian), of Hadjin roots, and of the distinguished, long-serving educator and principal Haykouhi Achemyan Patapoutian, both of whom are long-standing and esteemed members of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party.
Raised under an Armenian roof, receiving an Armenian upbringing, the worthy son of parents who educated generations with a national-ideological spirit, the young Ardem moved with his family to Los Angeles because of the Lebanese civil war, where he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California (UCLA), and his doctorate from the renowned CALTECH university.
Since 1982, he has directed the “Patapoutian Laboratory” of the great scientific institution SCRIPPS.
He received his doctorate in biology in 1996, in California.
He is married and has a son.
In 2017, the scientist Dr. Ardem Patapoutian was elected a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences of the United States, thanks to his tangible and sustained achievements in his research.
He is one of the researchers of the “Scripps” research institute and one of the lecturers of the neuroscience department; also, in 2017, he was one of the 84 new members of the said academy.
It should be noted that on 27 May 2020, in New York, during the World Science Festival, Ardem Patapoutian had been awarded the prestigious “KAVLI” prize in the field of science, given by the Norwegian Royal Academy of Sciences, in appreciation of his discovery of new theories on the effect of the nervous system’s perception of pressure and touch in human bodies on the cells of the heart and other human organs.
