The Nobel Prize committee has decided to jointly award this year's Prize for Physiology or Medicine to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.

David Julius is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, while Ardem Patapoutian is a Professor at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2014, Nobel Prize website said. Although working independently, the research conducted by the two researchers and their extended teams has improved our understanding of how we use our senses to perceive the world.

Back in the 17th century, Descartes proposed that threads connected different parts of the body to our brain. But it was only in the 20th century that scientists discovered sensory nerve fibers that responded to stimuli in our environment. Yet, even until a decade ago, we did not understand the exact mechanism of how the stimuli like temperature or pressure were converted into electrical impulses to be perceived by our brain.