Ardem Patapoutian, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine: ‘90% of people don’t even know they have a sense of proprioception’

At 57 years old and having won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, biologist Ardem Patapoutian decided to get his first tattoo: a huge drawing that would take up his entire right arm. His partner, fellow scientist Nancy Hong, responded with humor. “When I had the idea, my wife suggested I wait one year to see if I still wanted it. She’s very intelligent. She said, ‘Make sure it’s not a midlife crisis.’ So I waited one year,” he says with a laugh, rolling up his shirtsleeves and showing off his tattoo. It’s the outline of a molecule, the very one that earned him the Nobel Prize in 2021: the Piezo family of proteins, which are responsible for the sense of touch and an increasingly astonishing list of human characteristics.

Patapoutian repeatedly bends his arm, as if it were a living textbook. The drawing opens and closes hypnotically. In the membrane of some cells, these molecules function like an electrical switch, initiating a nerve impulse when they sense pressure. Since their existence was announced in 2010, the scientific community has discovered that Piezo proteins are essential in a multitude of vital processes, such as pain, blood pressure, breathing, bladder control, and even sexual arousal.

The scientist’s life story is inspiring. Patapoutian, the grandson of orphans of the Armenian genocide, was born in Beirut and grew up in Lebanon, torn apart by civil war. There, he was kidnapped by militants and held at gunpoint as a teenager, so he decided to emigrate to the United States. In Los Angeles, initially unable to understand the local English, he began a new life delivering pizzas for the fast-food chain Subway, but ended up studying biology and is now a researcher at the Scripps Institute in San Diego. After enjoying a paella at a beach bar in the Alicante town of Altea with his Spanish colleague Félix Viana, Patapoutian welcomed EL PAÍS to a hotel in Valencia, a city where he will serve as a jury member for the Rei Jaume I Awards.

Question. You are now an immigrant with tattoos, a prime candidate for deportation, according to the Trump administration.

Answer. Yes, yes [laughs].

Q. How were you kidnapped?

A. I was living in Beirut, which was a very religiously divided city. West Beirut was Muslim, East Beirut was Christian. As Armenians, we were more neutral, so we were the only Christians who could live in West Beirut, which is where my parents worked. One day, when I was 17, I went to a party in east Beirut, and on my way back, I heard snipers, which is common along the border. So I started running toward the west side. When I got there, there were militiamen who saw me running and called me over. They asked for my ID, which in Lebanon says what you religion are. So they became suspicious of a young Christian running toward the Muslim side of Beirut. They held me for a few hours, and I was really scared.

Q. And what happened?

A. They put a gun to my knee and said they were going to shoot. They said if I didn’t feel pain, it meant I was a spy. It was totally ridiculous. I said, “I could pretend to feel pain.” And they replied, “Oh, you think like a spy.” That was it. I was very scared, but a few hours later they let me go. I got home and thought, “I’m leaving this country.”

They put a gun to my knee and said they were going to shoot.

Q. Your story — that of an immigrant who started out delivering pizzas and went on to become a renowned scientist — has always been powerful, but it’s even more so now, given the current situation of immigrants in the United States.

A. I know. It’s very sad to think that what I did back then probably can’t be done anymore. My parents didn’t have much money, so I got a Pell Grant, a federal aid program for students who can’t afford college. Aid like that has been cut or no longer exists. Many young people would like to go to the United States to pursue their dreams, but that option is not available to them anymore. It’s very sad. I feel an extra responsibility to speak up now. Forty percent of Nobel Prize winners in the United States are immigrants, but this administration doesn’t value science or immigration.

Q. You were one of the 2,000 scientists who denounced the “real danger” of Trump in an open letter, which also mentioned the climate of fear. Many prestigious researchers refuse to speak out, but not you.

A. As a Nobel laureate, I feel I can afford to take the risk. If I lose government funding, it would be terrible, but I will survive. As an immigrant and a Nobel laureate, I feel a duty to speak up. If none of us speak up, there’s no hope.

Forty percent of Nobel Prize winners in the United States are immigrants, but this government does not value either science or immigration.

Q. You’ve criticized Trump’s plan to cut the National Institutes of Health’s budget by 40% on social media. You’ve said it would be a disaster.

A. Yes, people might think, “Well, with a 40% cut, there’s still 60% left.” But every government grant is for research for five years, which means 80% of the annual budget is already committed. A 40% cut means no new grants or cutting grants that have been promised already. It makes no sense. I wrote an opinion piece at CNN in which I included data showing that for every dollar the government spends on science, $3 goes into the economy. Cutting science means cutting economic gain and future medicines.

Q. In that article, you revealed that you had been approached with an offer to move to China, with 20 years of guaranteed financing.

A. Yes, they offered me stable research funding for any university that I want in China.

Q. Did you answer no or maybe?

A. I said no, because I love America. It’s my country, and I’m not going to give up on it that quickly.

I have turned down an offer to do research in China because I love my country and I’m not going to give up on it so quickly.

Q. Are these offers becoming more and more tempting?

A. I’m in a privileged position, but many excellent scientists might find that offer impossible to say no to. For China, Europe, and many other countries, right now is an opportunity to recruit the best minds in America.

Q. American chemist David Liu (one of the greatest living scientists) has warned that the impact of the cuts will be deadly. Do you think the science budget cuts will kill people?

A. Cutting funding won’t directly kill people, but the lack or slowdown of research and clinical trials will. The next cancer drug might be approved later, which could cause many people to die.

Q. You now have the Piezo protein tattooed on your arm, but the molecule seems to be everywhere.

A. It’s not everywhere, but it seems to be involved in many cells that sense pressure, whether it’s bladder filling or blood vessels. Biology thinks that most cells communicate by chemicals, whether it’s a hormone, a neurotransmitter... Everything is chemical. But what we’re discovering is that pressure sensing is also very important. We’re finding a new biology.

Q. Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal said at the end of the 19th century that neurons communicate through kisses.

A. That’s correct, by contact.

Q. Yesterday (June 2) you gave a seminar at the Alicante Institute of Neurosciences, organized by your colleague Félix Viana, on the newly discovered functions of Piezo proteins. What are they?

A. I can’t share this publicly because these results are unpublished and haven’t been released yet. But we did recently publish a work about their role in the gut and intestines. When food enters the body, neurons in the gastrointestinal tract sense the pressure and slow the food down, so you have more opportunity to extract nutrients. Without the Piezo 2 protein, food goes much faster through the gut. It’s a completely new biology. People with mutations in Piezo 2 have all kinds of digestive problems, like diarrhea and constipation. It’s one of the latest examples of the functions of Piezo proteins.

One of the lessons from our studies is that the idea of five senses is a bit naive.

Q. You proclaimed in your Nobel lecture that the most important sense is not sight, nor hearing, nor smell.

A. It’s proprioception. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, because some people might say that vision is most important for humans. It’s fascinating that probably 90% of people don’t even know they have a sense of proprioception, which is the sense of where your limbs are in space.

Q. Maybe it’s 99.99%.

A. I think people who do yoga or Pilates learn this word because it’s about being aware of their bodies. The simplest test is to close your eyes and touch your nose. If you think about how you’re able to tell where your fingers are with your eyes closed, you realize it’s because of how much your muscles are stretched. It’s the same sensor, Piezo 2, that senses this. You don’t feel that the muscle in your second finger is stretched, but rather you gather all the information, and your brain forms an image of where you are and what space you occupy. And that’s why, easily, without looking, you can walk, run, play soccer, play the violin. You can do all of this thanks to proprioception. And we take it for granted because you can’t turn it off. You can close your eyes and imagine what a blind person is like, but you can’t turn off proprioception. That’s why most people don’t know about it, because it’s always there. And it’s a big philosophical message: we take things for granted when we always have them.

Q. We always say we have five senses, do we have six?

A. Actually, we have many, many different senses. One of the lessons from our studies is that the idea of five senses is a bit naive. You can say that proprioception is the sixth sense. What about temperature sensation? What about sensing your bladder? It’s not touch — what is it then? It’s another sense. So all these different senses, which in our minds are very distinct, like blood pressure sensing and lung stretch, are not touch, but they’re all being done by the same molecule. The definitions are hard to ascertain, but we certainly have more than five senses.

Q. You have five rules for doing science.

A. Yes, and I think these rules apply to all creative disciplines, not just science. Rule number one is not to be too busy. This is easier said than done, but it’s very important. If you’re very busy, you’re not creative. I create pockets of time for myself. For example, I don’t have meetings on Tuesdays. I have time to spend in the lab thinking and reading.

Rule number one is not to be too busy: if you’re very busy, you’re not creative.

Q. What else?

A. Change your field of work. I compare this to being an immigrant. When you’re an immigrant, you go to a new country and see that people do things differently. So, you adopt the ways that make sense to you, but you keep the ones that also make sense to you. And you blend them. And changing areas in science is the same. You go to a new field, you bring your knowledge of how to do things with you, but you also learn from the new field and blend them. Rule number 3 is: Surround yourself with critics. Especially if you win the Nobel Prize, people criticize you less. I have close colleagues and friends who tell me when I’m wrong. When you’re successful, you start to think you know everything, but you don’t. That’s why you need someone to constantly tell you that you’re talking nonsense.

Q. The fourth rule is don’t listen to advice.

A. That’s a funny one, isn’t it? I offer advice, and one of them is not to follow the advice. Sometimes people listen to what an authority says just because they’re an authority, but you have to check if it makes sense to you. If someone tells you to do something and it doesn’t make sense to you, don’t do it. Rule number 5 is my main reason for doing science: because it’s fun. I love that we’re doing translational research to find medicines, but my goal has always been to do curiosity-driven research. If you look back at the history of science, curiosity-driven research often yields the most important applications. So I think society needs to learn that the best way to do science, the best way to find future medicines, is to fund curiosity-driven research. And the applications will come. There are many examples of this. The CRISPR technique, which is famous for manipulating DNA and is revolutionizing biotechnology, is based on the science of how viruses infect bacteria.

Q. It is precisely due to the work of a Spanish microbiologist, Francis Mojica, who is from nearby.

A. Yes, but people think: Who cares about that research? I’ve heard that when electricity was discovered, someone asked: “What is this good for?” Well, now it’s kind of important.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition