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 already a Nobel Prize winner 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, took it with humor. “When I had the idea, my wife suggested I wait a year, in case I lost my temper. She's very intelligent. She said, 'Make sure it's not a midlife crisis.' So I waited a year,” he says with a laugh, rolling up his shirtsleeves and showing off his tattoo . It's the outline of the molecule for whose discovery he won the Nobel Prize in 2021: the Piezo family of proteins, 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, scientists have discovered that these 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 biography is inspiring. Patapoutian, the grandson of orphans of the Armenian genocide , was born in Beirut and grew up in Lebanon, bled dry by civil war. There, militiamen kidnapped him and held him 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 rice at a beach bar in the Alicante town of Altea with his Spanish colleague Félix Viana , Patapoutian welcomes EL PAÍS to a hotel in Valencia, where he has come to sit on the jury for the Rei Jaume I Awards .

Question: You are now a tattooed immigrant, a prime candidate for deportation , according to the Trump administration .

Answer: Yes, yes [laughs].

Q. How was your kidnapping?

A. I lived in Beirut, which was a very religiously divided city. Muslims lived in the west. Christians lived in the east. As Armenians, we were neutral, so we were the only Christians allowed to live in the west, 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 sniper fire, a common occurrence along the border. So I started running toward the west side. When I arrived, there were militiamen who saw me running and called me. They asked for my ID, which in Lebanon tells you what your religion is. 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 starts out delivering pizzas and ends up becoming a prestigious 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 no longer available to them. It's very sad. I feel an extra responsibility to speak out. 40% of Nobel Prize winners in the United States are immigrants, but this government doesn't value science or immigration.

Q. You were one of the two thousand scientists who denounced the "real danger" of Trump in an open letter , in which you mentioned the climate of fear. Many prestigious researchers refuse to criticize in public, but you do not.

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

40% of Nobel Prize winners in the United States are immigrants, but this government does not value either science or immigration.

Q. You've denounced on social media Trump's intention to cut the National Institutes of Health's budget by 40% . 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 existing ones. It’s incomprehensible. I wrote an op-ed for CNN in which I included data showing that for every dollar the government invests in science, it generates about three dollars in economic growth. Cutting science means reducing economic income and medicines for the future.

Q. In that article, you revealed that you've been offered a move to China, with 20 years of guaranteed financing.

A: Yes, I was offered stable funding at any Chinese university I chose.

Q. Did you answer no or maybe?

A. I answered no, because I love the United States. It's my country, and I'm not going to give up so 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 so quickly.

Q. Are these offers becoming more and more tempting?

A. I'm in a privileged position, but it may be an offer too difficult for many excellent scientists to refuse. For China, Europe, and many other countries, this moment is an opportunity to recruit the best minds from the United States.

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 kill people directly, but the lack or slowdown of research and clinical trials will. The next cancer drug might be approved later, which could cause the deaths of many people.

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 detect pressure, whether it's bladder filling or blood vessels. Biology considers that most cells communicate through chemicals, whether it's a hormone, a neurotransmitter… Everything is chemical. But what we're discovering is that pressure detection is also very important. We're discovering a new biology.

P. The Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal already 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 are unpublished results, which we haven't yet published. But we did recently publish their role in the stomach and intestines. When food enters the body, neurons in the gastrointestinal tract detect the pressure and slow the food down , increasing the chances of extracting nutrients. Without the Piezo 2 protein, food moves through much faster. It's a completely new biology. People with mutations in Piezo 2 have all kinds of digestive problems, such as 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 bit, because some people might say that vision is the most important thing for humans. It's fascinating that probably 90% of people don't even know they have a sense of proprioception, which is sensing 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 they're aware of their bodies. The simplest experiment 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 due to how much your muscles are stretched. It's the same sensor, Piezo 2, that detects this. You don't feel the muscle in your second finger 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 this is a great 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 the sensation of temperature? What about bladder perception? That's not touch, so what is it? It's another sense. So all these different senses, which in our minds are very distinct, like the perception of blood pressure and lung stretch, are not touch, but they are all detected by the same molecule. Definitions are hard to pin down, 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 that you shouldn't be busy all the time. It's easier said than done, but it's very important. If you're too busy, you're not creative. I make 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 that you shouldn't be busy all the time: if you're too busy, you're not creative.

Q. What else?

A. Changing your field of work. I compare it 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 mix them up. And changing areas in science is the same. You go to a new field, you bring with you your knowledge of how to do things, but you also learn from the new field and combine them. Rule number 3 is: Surround yourself with critics. Especially when 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 not to 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 , here nearby.

A. Yes, but people think: Who cares about that research? I've heard that when electricity was discovered, someone asked: "What's this good for?" Well, now it's just a little bit important.