I met Ardem Patapoutian over coffee and croissants at Darshan Bakery in Del Mar in the spring of 2022. He had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine just months earlier, for discoveries about something we experience almost continuously and rarely stop to consider: how the body feels touch.
After breakfast, we took a long walk along the ocean before heading toward his laboratory and office at Scripps Research. Ardem is also a photographer. I noticed his interest in the shape of a cactus and the angles of a lifeguard station. At Scripps, shadows on the concrete caught his attention. He saw connections between form, function, and beauty. Walking beside him, I began to appreciate how naturally his pleasure in looking accompanied his desire to understand.
His research had begun with a question hidden inside an ordinary experience. Pressure is a mechanical event. A nerve signal is electrical. How does a cell turn one into the other? We can feel the slightest brush against our skin, yet for years the molecular machinery that makes this possible remained elusive.
His team began with cells that produced an electrical response when pressed with a tiny pipette. They identified seventy-two genes that might encode the sensor and silenced them one at a time. Most changes left the response intact. When they switched off one particular gene, the cells stopped responding to the probe.
That painstaking search led to PIEZO1, a protein that forms a channel in the cell membrane. Mechanical force opens the channel, allowing charged particles to flow through. Their movement changes the cell’s electrical state. At this almost inconceivably small scale, a change in a protein’s shape helps a cell register the physical world.
A related channel, PIEZO2, proved essential to touch and to proprioception, our sense of where our limbs are without looking. Close your eyes and bend an elbow. You still know where your arm is. Signals arising in muscles and tendons help make that awareness possible.
The importance of PIEZO2 became especially clear in studies by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. People with rare mutations that disrupted the protein had profound difficulties sensing the position of their limbs. They relied heavily on sight to guide movements that most of us perform without thought. The discovery helped explain an overlooked part of human experience: how we inhabit our own bodies.
Ardem shared the 2021 Nobel Prize with David Julius, whose work identified receptors involved in sensing temperature. Their discoveries gave researchers new ways to investigate sensation and pain, as well as the mechanical signals that help regulate processes inside the body.
On our walk, the connections between his science and photography felt close at hand. The shape of something could invite a question about how it worked, or simply hold his attention. I liked that there was room for both. His work had revealed how a cell responds to the slightest pressure. Along the ocean and among the buildings at Scripps, I watched him give his own attention to the world, finding beauty in details we could easily have walked past.
