Hacker News Reader

Comment by docdocgoose | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate that some Nobel selections, like this one, are for core biological discoveries rather than hot topics.

How our bodies perceive / interface with the world is fundamental to our human experience: Pain, temperature, positioning. And that these perceptions can be significantly modulated by how our bodies process them (eg pain).

Not only is their actual body of work impressive, as it cuts across so many methodologies to get a glimpse at “how things work,” their discoveries opened up fields for others.

View on HN

Hard disagree. These are for lack of better word standard discoveries that the high intensity labs discover with pretty much standard methodologies and no Innovations worthy of a Nobel. Of course we have receptors for heat and touch, and of course someone eventually found them. What’s original in that process? This is not RNAi, or CRISPR, or GFP. One of the more underwhelming Nobels in recent times. Somehow worse than superresolution.

Hard disagree your hard disagree.

If you throw a vase in the air it will fall down and shatter: like, duh it’s gravity. But how many years to figure the equations? To tie the how/why to the obvious?

Don’t trivialize their work because your work didn’t receive a Nobel. K thanks.

These discoveries could be game changers for prosthetics, brain computer interfaces, augmented reality, etc.

I’m trivializing their research based on their inherent triviality. Any new gene could be game changers for a plethora of ailments. The correct gravity comparison would be trying to celebrate someone finding the value of g in Oxford when the original measurement was in London.

I didn’t say I am sour I didn’t get one. When did a film critic need an Oscar before he could criticize moviemakers?

I've no background in the field but tend to agree. "Humans have thousands of different kinds of sensor mechanisms, and here are two of them" - seems like an award that could be given repeatedly, no?

The criteria for winning the prize depend more on the outcome of the research (importance) than its process (originality):

"The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- – -/ one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine …” (Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel)".

Again, why are these genes more important than say, GM-CSF? That gene has 10 times more therapeutic importance than these genes. I can name 500 genes more important for any practical purpose than these genes. That’s the reason none of the early scientists were scrambling to discover them.

Something as fundamental as heat and pressure are not important? I don't have a biology background, but learning that we just discovered these genes gave me the impression that we're still living in the stone age. Kudos to the award recipients for discovering the genes responsible.

It's probably that much harder to find these genes responsible for such basic sensory abilities that so much work must have gone into them if not for their lack therapeutic importance as you suggest, but also for the prestige scientists knew they would receive if they did discover them first.

You are absolutely right that it’s dumb that it took so long for us to have discovered these receptors so late. Consider for a second though that this might be a symptom of a fundamental myopia in the way biological science itself has progressed? That perhaps we have been congratulating people for the wrong thing - discovering expected genes instead of finding new ways to do everything faster or finding things that are completely unexpected. As much as heat and pressure sound like fundamental senses (they are), they aren’t very high on the priority list of basically anyone trying to do biology with applications in mind. Heat receptors don’t cure cancer or cystic fibrosis. Or Covid.

TRP channels were first cloned over 20 years ago, and are indeed medically relevant for nociception and pain. The piezos are equally relevant; knockouts are embryonically lethal, and the function of mechanosenstation in somatosenation and in general continue to be elucidated. For instance, it was only a few years that they were identified as being required for the baroreceptor reflex.

>I can name 500 genes more important for any practical purpose than these genes.

The arrogance of this statement is astrounding. Perhaps you didn't mean it to come off that way?

First of all, these are important genes - extremely important genes, because they are a large part of the basis of that whole "response to stimulus" thing that people are pretty fond of associating with life.

That said, regardless of their actual importance, it's pretty remarkable for anyone to say any gene is important or not important considering how little we actually know about biological processes. I see all the time people doing "omics" work and wanting to jump to conclusion because of data, but data-only makes a relatively blind conclusion. There's still far far more unknown than known, and these genes are fundamental genes for starting to actually build a functional model of human biology. They are boilerplate genes.

Wait what exactly are you saying. In one paragraph you’re saying that these genes are unquestionably important. Then next paragraph you’re saying no gene can be told as important. Pick a side?

You seem to be a biologist, is it truly heresy that there are 500 other genes that are more important than the temperature receptors? I’m talking practical therapeutic use.

Nobel prize seems like a marketing agency to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com