The Vital Role of Immigrants in Scientific Advancements

Piezo touch and pressure-sensing ion channels are showing up everywhere as the explanation for physiologic phenomena, both at the macro and micro levels. Ardem Patapoutian, my friend and colleague at Scripps Research, discovered these receptors back in 2010 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2021 for his work. As you’ll see/hear from our conversation, the field has exploded. And you’ll get to know Ardem, who is such a fun, charismatic, and down-to-earth person. He also recently got a unique tattoo (videos below) and I wonder (unlikely) if any other Nobel laureates have one related to their discovery?!

Below is a video clip from our conversation. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The current one is here. If you like the YouTube format, please subscribe! The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.

Transcript with links to audio

Eric Topol (00:07):

Well, hello. It's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I've really got a special guest today. The first time for the podcast, I've been able to interview a colleague and faculty at Scripps Research, Ardem Patapoutian, who just by the way happens to be the 2021 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine. So welcome, Ardem. It's so wonderful to have you.

Ardem Patapoutian (00:30):

Thanks so much, Eric. Looking forward to chatting with you.

Eric Topol (00:34):

Well, this has been interesting because although I've known you for several years, I didn't research you. I mean, I had to learn about more than I even do. And of course, one of the great sources of that is on the Nobel Prize website where you tell your whole story. It is quite a story and not to review all of it, but I wanted to go back just before you made the call to move to Los Angeles from Beirut, Lebanon and with the scare that you went through at that time, it seemed like that was just extraordinary that you had to live through that.

Ardem Patapoutian (01:11):

Yeah, so I am of Armenian origin, but I was born in Lebanon and born in 1967, so I was eight years old when the civil war started. So it's a kind of bizarre childhood in the sense that with all the bombs and fighting in Lebanon. So it was tough childhood to have, but it was never personal. It was bombs and such. And so, the event you're talking about is, I happened to be kidnapped while crossing East to West Beirut. They only held me for four or five hours at first asking me questions to see who I am, but I think they pretty soon figured out that I was not a dangerous guy and they ended up letting me go. But before that, that incident really had a huge impact on me so that by the time I got home, I literally said, I'm out of here. I'm going to find a way to leave the country. And so, that's what, very quickly within a few months I packed and came to United States.

Eric Topol (02:19):

And how did you pick LA to be your destination?

Ardem Patapoutian (02:22):

Being from the Armenian community, there's a lot of Armenians in Los Angeles. My cousins already had moved there. They also grew up in Lebanon. And my brother, who's a few years older than me, got admitted to USC graduate school in engineering. So he was going to be there. So it made a lot of sense.

Eric Topol (02:44):

Oh yeah.

Ardem Patapoutian (02:45):

Unlike him, I came with no school or job prospects because it happened so fast that I kind of just left. One year I was at American University of Beirut for one year, but then just left and came here. So worked for a year in various jobs and then started going back to school to UCLA.

Eric Topol (03:07):

Yeah, I saw how there was about a year where you were delivering pizzas and before you got into UCLA, and that must have been an interesting off year, if you will. Well, the story of course, just to fast forward, you did your baccalaureate at UCLA, your PhD at Caltech, postdoc at UCSF, and then you came to Scripps Research 24 years ago along with Pete Schultz, and it's been quite an amazing run that you've had. Now, before we get into PIEZO receptors, the background, maybe you could help me understand, the precursor work seems to be all related to the transient receptor potential (TRP) series, also ion channels. They were of course related to whether it was heat and temperature or somatosensory. How do these channels compare to the ones that you discovered years later?

Background on these Ion Channels

Ardem Patapoutian (04:09):

Yeah, so the somatosensory neurons that innervate your fingertips and everywhere else in your body, their main job is to sense temperature and pressure. And this is very different than any other neuron or any other cell. So when you touch a hot stove that’s burning hot, you need to know about that immediately within milliseconds or something cold. So the opposite side of it is pressure sensing, and it also comes in light touch, which is pleasant or a hammer hitting your finger, which is unpleasant. But all of these have the same characteristic anyway, that is your body has learned at the molecular level to translate a physical stimulus such as temperature and pressure into an electrical signal that neurons use to communicate with each other. But this idea of how you translate physical stimuli into chemical or electrical signal has been a long open question because as you know, most of our cells communicate by chemicals, whether that's hormones or small molecules, we know how that works, receptor bind to ligand, confirmational change and you get a kinase activation and that's enough. But here, how do you sense pressure? How do you sense temperature? It was just, there wasn't much known about that. And that's why our earlier work on TRP channels, which were temperature sensors came before the pressure. And so, they're very related in that sense.

Eric Topol (05:52):

The structure of these, if you were to look at them, do they look pretty similar? What the TRP as you say, and what you did back in the 2010 Science paper, which we'll link to, of course the classic paper where you describe PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, but if you were to look at this structures, would they look pretty similar?

Ardem Patapoutian (06:14):

No, that's a good question. And they absolutely don't. That's why finding these receptors were so hard. So if you go back to other sensory receptors, vision rhodopsin G-protein coupled receptor (GPCRs), larger G-protein coupled receptor look the same. So for example, when it was identified by chemically, that smell also works through G-protein coupled receptor. Richard Axel and Linda Buck, who also won the Nobel Prize, found those receptors by homology to visual GPCRs. The ion channels other than the fact that they crossed the membrane a few times or more, they have nothing else in common. If you looked at their structure, you can't even immediately tell they’re ion channels. So you couldn't find these by structural homology or sequence homology. So you had to do something else. And usually that means functional screens and et cetera.

Eric Topol (07:09):

Well, yeah, and I'm in touch with the screening. We'll get to that and how you dig these up and find them. But the somatosensory ones are really interesting because I don't think a lot of people realize that when you have wasabi or you have Listerine mouthwash and feel the burn and that these are all mediated through these channels, right?

Ardem Patapoutian (07:35):

Yeah. So there's this whole field of chemesthesis, which means senses in your mouth, for example, that are not explained by taste transduction and olfactory. And these are actually by the same somatosensory neurons that help you sense temperature and pressure. And some of these receptors are the same. Their evolution has taken over and used them for many different things. The prime example of this is the capsaicin receptor that David Julius my co-laureate identified, which is also heat receptors. So all languages describe chili peppers as hot, and that's not a coincidence. It actually activates heat activated channel, and that's why we think of it as hot. And so, the same goes to another one of these TRP channels that you mentioned, which is TRPA1, and this one is also activated, but a lot of spicy foods other than the chili pepper active ingredient includes what's in garlic and onions and everything that has this burning sensation and chemicals of this and wasabi and chemicals of this are used in over the counter products like Listerine that cause that burning sensation.

Eric Topol (08:54):

So when you're chopping onions and it makes you cry, is that all part of it as well?

Ardem Patapoutian (08:59):

That’s all TRPA1, yeah.

The Discovery, A Test of Perseverance

Eric Topol (09:01):

It's wild. Now, this was the groundwork. There were these heat temperature and somatic sensory, and then you were starting to wonder what about touch, what about out pressure and proprioception. And so, you went on a hunt, and it's actually kind of an incredible story about how you were able to find out of these cells that you had, screening hundreds or I guess you got to 72 different small interfering RNA blocking that you finally found the one. Is that right?

Ardem Patapoutian (09:37):

That's right. So in retrospect, looking back at it, I think there's such an interesting scientific message there. And so, many of us were looking for this touch pressure sensors and we were all looking in the DRG sensory neurons that are complicated heterogeneous, they don't divide. It's not easy to do a screen on them. And ultimately after a lot of failures, what worked for us is to take a step back and ask a much more simpler question. And that was, can we find one of these cell lines that you could easily homogeneously grow in a culture dish, if they respond to mechanical force, can we find our channel there? And then go back and look if it's relevant in vivo for what process. So I think the message is ask the simplest question to answer the question you're after. And finding what that is, is actually the challenge lots of times.

Ardem Patapoutian (10:36):

But yeah, that's what Bertrand Coste in my lab did is found a simple cell line that neuroscientists had been using for a hundred years and somehow found that they over overexpressed this channel because you can record from them, you can push them and record the currents from them. And then it became a simpler question of finding it. It still took a whole year. He made a list and one by one knocking them out and looking at it. And finally, as you say, number 72 was the hit. When he knocked that out, the current was gone. And that's where we started believing that we have what we were looking for.

Eric Topol (11:12):

Were you all ever about ready to give up at that point?

Ardem Patapoutian (11:16):

Oh yeah. I mean that's another lesson. These are postdocs doing the work, right? And they're here three, four years and this was coming close to end of two years, and he didn't have anything yet. So we started talking about having a backup project and he started that and we said, okay, we were ordering this oligos 30 at a time because they're expensive. And so, the first 30 nothing, the second 30 nothing. And how many more are we going to do before we potentially give up? And we said, well, let's do at least a third and then decide, thank goodness it was in that last set.

Eric Topol (11:54):

Wow, that is so wild. Now what's happened since this discovery, which I guess when you published it in 2010, so it means 14 years ago, but we're on this exponential growth of learning that these piezo receptors are everywhere. They're doing everything. In fact, I recently put on Bluesky, PIEZO ion channels are to human physiology as GLP-1 drugs are to treating many diseases because it's just blowing up. And you've published on some of these of course, on itch and bladder function and vascular function. We'll get to maybe malaria, I mean, but even the cover of Science recently was about wet dog shakes and how animals shake because of water. These receptors are so fundamental to our function. So maybe you could comment, 15 years ago when you were doing the work and you're making this discovery, did you ever envision it was going to blow up like this?

Ardem Patapoutian (12:57):

Not to this level, but I should have. I think that this idea, again, that most of cell communication is through chemicals is of course a lot of it is true.

Ardem Patapoutian (13:12):

But it would be ridiculous for evolution to ignore all the physical forces, the pressures that cells experience. And once they do, you would think you would put an instructive way of sensing this pressure signal and using it beneficially to the system or the cell. And so, when we used to talk about pressure sensing at the beginning, there were a couple of touch, pain, maybe proprioception, hearing are like the poster children of pressure sensing. But I think what these molecules, as you say is enabling us is finding out the much more wider role that pressure sensing is playing in physiology and in disease that no one had thought seriously about. And this is, I compare sometimes the finding the PIEZO molecules. You're going in a dark room, and you need to find a door to get into there. And PIEZO is kind of that finding the door once you get in, now you use that molecule now to find physiology instead of the opposite way around. So by pursuing PIEZO expression and function, we're finding all these new roles that they play in physiology and in disease that we didn't think about. And because they're so specialized to sense tension, membrane tension, they don't do anything else. So if you see them expressed somewhere or if you see a function for them, you can bet that they are playing a role in sensing pressure. A lot of biology has kind of come from this hypothesis.

Eric Topol (15:00):

Well, I mean it is so striking to see the pervasiveness, and I do want to go back just for a second because when you name them PIEZO, you named it after the Greek word. How did you come to that name?

Ardem Patapoutian (15:13):

So Bertrand and I were actually sitting on Google Translate and we were typing pressure and trying to see what it's like in Greek or in Latin or different languages. His native French and my Armenian and píesi in Greek is pressure. And of course, what's really cool is that the word that more people know about this is piezoelectric device.

Eric Topol (15:41):

Oh, right.

Ardem Patapoutian (15:41):

Actually, translates physical force into electricity and vice versa. And in a way, this is a little molecular machine that does the same thing, and he uses this piezoelectric device to actually push on the cell. That's his assay. So it all came together as a very appropriate name for this gene and protein.

Call from the Nobel Committee

Eric Topol (16:04):

Oh really, it’s perfect. And you get to name it, even that's fun too, right? Now we're going to go to getting the call at 2:00 AM, but it didn't come to you because your phone from the Nobel Committee was on ‘do not disturb’ and your 94-year-old father, Sarkis. How did the Nobel Committee know to get ahold of him? How did they reach him in the middle of the night?

Ardem Patapoutian (16:37):

Yeah, so I mean, since receiving it, I've had conversations with various committee members, and they are very resourceful folks, and they have assistants who throughout the year collect information on all potential people who might win. They're also doing last minute searches. So they looked for other Patapoutian’s in California. So they just called my dad who initially yelled at them for disturbing him at 2:00 AM.

Eric Topol (17:17):

And he could get through to you because he was not on your list of ‘do not disturb’ or something like that.

Ardem Patapoutian (17:22):

I didn't even know this. And I don’t know if the policy has changed, but in some phones the ‘do not disturb’ if it's called by someone who's in your contacts or favorites.

Ardem Patapoutian (17:34):

After I think they called twice and they get through, and that's how.

Getting a Tattoo!

Eric Topol (17:39):

That's amazing. Wow. Well, that's quite a way to find out that you're getting recognized like this. Now recently you got a tattoo, which I thought was really remarkable, but we're going to put that of course in the post. Tell us about your decision to get the PIEZO channel on your arm.

Ardem Patapoutian (18:02):

So as you can tell, I'm obsessed about PIEZO and it's been good to me. And I had the idea a while ago, and my very wise wife, Nancy Hong, said that you might be going through midlife crisis. Why don't you wait a year? If you still believe in it, you should do it. And that's what I did. I waited a year, and I was like, I still want to do it. And I guess I could show it. Here it is.

Eric Topol (18:32):

Oh yeah, there it is. Oh wow.

Ardem Patapoutian (18:33):

What’s cool is that I can pretty much flex to show the activation mechanism because the channel is like bent like this in the plasma membrane. When it's stretched, it opens and it actually flattens like this. So I feel like other than being a tattoo, this is both performance art and instructional device. When I'm giving talks without PowerPoint slides, I could give a demonstration how this ion channel works.[Below is from a presentation that Ardem recently gave, the Harvey Lecture, at Rockefeller University.]

Eric Topol (19:04):

It's wild. Now how did you find a tattoo artist that could, I mean, it's pretty intricate. I mean, that's not your typical tattoo.

Ardem Patapoutian (19:14):

Yeah, I put it up on social media that I was thinking of doing this, and many scientists are into tattoos, so I actually got so many recommendations. And one of them was a local here in San Diego, and she is very popular. I waited six months to get this, I was on a waiting list. The appointment was six months off when we made it. So she's very popular and she's very good.

Eric Topol (19:45):

Was it painful to get that done?

Ardem Patapoutian (19:47):

Well, that's actually really cool, right? Because PIEZO2 is involved in pain sensation, and I felt it while it was being tattooed on my arm. The whole day, I was there like six and a half hours.

New Prospect for Pain Medication

Eric Topol (20:00):

Oh my gosh. Wow. Now that gets me to pain because, I'd like you to talk a bit about the people that don't have mutations or loss of function PIEZO receptors and also what your thoughts are in the future as to maybe we could develop a lot better pain medications.

Ardem Patapoutian (20:22):

Yeah, we're working on it. So you're right. One of the great parts of the science story, and this is mainly the work of Alex Chesler and Carsten Bönnemann at the NIH, where they identified people who came to the clinic for undiagnosed conditions, and they were uncoordinated and had difficulty walking. And when they did whole-exome sequencing, they found that they had mutations in PIEZO2, there were loss of function, as you say. So complete loss on both chromosomes. And when they started testing them, they realized that just like we had described them in animal models, humans without PIEZO2 as well, didn't sense touch, don't have proprioception. This sense of where your limbs are, that's so important for balance and most other daily functions that we take it for granted. So they were completely lacking all of those sensations. They also do not feel their bladder filling.

Ardem Patapoutian (21:26):

And so, they have learned to go on a schedule to make sure they don't have accidents. And many of these projects that we've done in the lab collaboration with Alex Chesler, et cetera, have come from the observations of what else these individuals experience. And so, it's been a great kind of collaboration communication between mechanistic animal model studies and the clinic. And so, one of the things that these individuals don't sense in addition to touch, is something called tactile allodynia, which is simply when touch becomes painful. You and I experienced this after small injury or sunburn where just touching your shoulder becomes painful, but for peripheral neuropathy and other neuropathic pain conditions, this is one of the major complaints that individuals have. And we know from the NIH studies that these individuals don't have this tactile allodynia. So touch becomes painful and doesn't apply to them, which tells us that if we block PIEZO2, we can actually get interesting relief from various aspects relative to neuropathic pain on other pain related neuropathies. But given everything we talked about, Eric, about how this is important for touch and proprioception, you don't want to make a pill that blocks PIEZO2 and you take it because this will have some serious on target side effects. But we are developing new compounds that block PIEZO2 and hope that it might be useful, at least as a topical medication pain and other indications. And we're actively working on this, as I said.

Eric Topol (23:15):

Yeah, I mean the topical one sounds like a winner because of peripheral neuropathy, but also I wonder if you could somehow target it to sick cells rather than if giving it in a systemic targeted way. I mean it has tremendous potential because we are on a serious hunt for much better relief of pain than exists today.

Ardem Patapoutian (23:41):

Absolutely.

Eric Topol (23:42):

Yeah. So that's exciting. I mean, that's another potential outgrowth of all this. Just going back, I mean the one that prompted me in November to write that about the human physiology in PIEZO, it was about intestinal stem cell fate decision and maintenance. I mean, it's just everywhere. But the work you've done certainly now has spurred on so many other groups to go after these different and many unanticipated functions. Were there any ones, of course, you've been pretty systematically addressing these that actually surprised you? You said, oh, are you kidding me when you read this? I never would've guessed this, or pretty much they followed suit as things were moving along.

Ardem Patapoutian (24:33):

So one of them is this role in macrophages that I found fascinating that we found a few years ago. So again, this came from human studies where PIEZO1 gain-of-function mutations. So in relation to loss of function, their gain-of-function where there's more activity given a certain amount of pressure. They have dehydrated red blood cells, which I'm not going to talk about right now. But they also have shown that in these patients, individuals, it's not really that pathological. They also have age-onset iron overload. What does that have to do with pressure sensing? And we brought that information into animal models, and we found that macrophages, their rate of phagocytosis depends on PIEZO, so that if you have too little PIEZO, they don't phagocytosis as much. If you have too much PIEZO, the phagocytosis too much. And this increased rate of phagocytosis in the long term because it's constantly eating red blood cells and the iron is circulating more causes long-term effects in iron overload. And again, as you kind of set that up, who would've thought that mechanical sensation is important for this basic hematology type?

Eric Topol (25:52):

Yeah, I mean, because we've been talking about the macro things, and here it is at the cellular level. I mean, it's just wild.

Ardem Patapoutian (25:59):

If you go back and look at a video of a macrophage eating up red blood cells, then you go, oh, I see how this has to do with pressure sensing because it is like extending little arms, feeling things letting go, going somewhere else. So again, I want to bring it back by this simple cell biological function of a cell type, like macrophage, exploring its environment is not just chemical, but very mechanical as well. And so, in retrospect, it is maybe not that surprising, that pressure sensing is important for its physiology.

Career Changing?

Eric Topol (26:33):

Yeah, that's extraordinary. Well, that gets me to how your life has changed since 2021, because obviously this a big effect, big impact sort of thing. And I know that you're the first Armenian, first person from Lebanon to get this recognition. You recognized by the Lebanese Order of Merit. There's even a stamp of you, your picture characterized in 2022.

Eric Topol (27:04):

So if you were to sum up how it's changed because I see no change in you. You're the same person that has a great sense of humor. Often the tries to humor relaxed, calming. You haven't changed any to me, but how has it affected you?

Ardem Patapoutian (27:26):

Thank you, Eric. That's very kind of you. I try very hard for it not to change me. I do get a little bit more attention, a ton more invites, which unfortunately I have to say no to a lot of them because, and I'm sure you're very familiar with that concept and a lot of things are offered to you that I feel like it's so tempting to say yes because they're wonderful opportunities and an honor to be asked. But the end of the day, I'm trying to be very disciplined and not taking things on that I can do as an opportunity. But things that I really want to do. I think that's so hard to do sometimes is to separate those two. Why am I doing this? Is this really important for the goals that I have? So in one way, the answer for that is that I just want to stay in the lab and do my research with my students and postdoc, which is what I enjoy the most. But on the other hand, as you said, being the first Armenian who's received this, literally after the Nobel, I got this whole elementary school, all Armenian kids write to me multiple letters.

Ardem Patapoutian (28:39):

And they said, you look like me. I didn't think I could do this, but maybe I can. So in a sense, to ignore that and say, no, I just want to do my science, I don't want to be involved in any of that is also wrong. So I'm trying to balance being engaged in science outreach and helping to make science understood by the general public, realize that we're just regular people and at the same time how awesome science is. I love science and I like to project that, but leave plenty of time for me to just be a scientist and be in my lab and interact with my colleagues at Scripps, including you.

Immigrant Scientists

Eric Topol (29:21):

Well, we're so lucky to have that chance. And I do want to mention, because you're prototyping in this regard about great immigrant scientists and other domains of course, but every year the Carnegie Foundation names these great immigrants and one year you were of course recognized. And in recent years, there have been more difficulties in people wanting to come to the US to get into science, and they wind up going to other places. It seems like that's a big loss for us. I mean, what if we weren't able to have had you come and so many hundreds, thousands of others that have contributed to this life science community? Maybe you could comment about that.

Ardem Patapoutian (30:10):

Yeah, I think it is tragic, as you say. I think in some circles, immigrants have this negative image or idea of what they bring, but at every level, immigrants have contributed so much to this country. It's a country of immigrants, of course, to start with. And I think it is important to put up a positive image of immigration and science is the ultimate example of that, right? I mean, I think when you go into any laboratory, you probably find if there's a lab of 16 people, you probably find people from 10 different countries. And we all work together. And the idea of also immigrant and especially about science is that I'm a big believer of changing field, changing things because just like that, immigrants have changed their whole life. So they come to a new culture, they bring with them their own way of thinking and their way of seeing things. And then you come into a new environment, and you see it a little bit differently. So that kind of change, whether it's because of physical immigration or immigrating from one field to another in science is really beneficial for science and society. And I think positive examples of this are an important part of highlighting this.

Eric Topol (31:40):

I couldn't agree with you more really.

Bluesky vs Twitter/X

Eric Topol (31:41):

Now, speaking of migration, there's been recently a big migration out of X, formerly Twitter to Bluesky, which I like the metaphor you liken to the Serengeti. Can you tell us about, now I know you're posting on Bluesky and of course so many others that you and I are mutual contacts, and our different networks are. What do you think about this migration outside of what was the platform where a lot of this, we shared things on X or before Musk took over known as Twitter? Thoughts about Bluesky?

Ardem Patapoutian (32:27):

Yeah, I think I use social media for a few reasons. The number one reason should be is to see new science by colleagues. My main point is that, but also, again, having fun in science is a big part of my draw to this. And as you can see from my posts, it's a bit lighthearted, and that's really me.

Eric Topol (32:52):

Right. Yeah.

Ardem Patapoutian (32:52):

I think on Twitter, things start getting a little bit dark and too many negative comments, and it was just not productive. And I just felt like after the elections, I felt like it was time to migrate. And I find Bluesky a great scientific community, and it's remarkable how quickly people have migrated from Twitter to Bluesky. But the counter argument for this is that you should stay in a place where majority of people are, because being in a bubble surrounding yourself by people like you doesn't help society. And so, I get that perspective as well. It just depends on what you're using the platform for and it's a difficult issue. But yeah, I've taken a break probably long-term break from Twitter. I'm on Bluesky now.

Eric Topol (33:48):

Yeah, no, the point you're bringing up about the echo chamber and is there going to be one for people that are leaning one way and they're thinking, and another with a whole different, often politically charged and even extreme views? It's really unfortunate if it does wind up that way. But right now, it seems like that migration is ongoing and it's substantial. And I guess we'll see how it settles out. I share your concern, and so far, I've been trying to keep a foot in both areas because I think if we all were to leave, then we're just kind of caving into a, it's tricky though. It really is because the noxious toxic type of comments, even when you try to avoid comments, you say, only followers can make a comment, they’ll of course, quote your thing and then try to ding you and whatever. It's just crazy stuff, really.

Ardem Patapoutian (34:53):

I mean, what I think is that, that's why I said depends on why. I mean, your presence on social media is such an important part of science education. And I could almost say you can't afford to do what I do, which is I'm just putting my goofy posts and having fun. So we have different purposes in a way, and yeah, that affects what you use and how you use it.

Eric Topol (35:17):

Yeah, no, it's tricky it really is. We covered a lot of ground. Is there anything I missed that you want to get out there? Any part of this, your story and the PIEZO story, science and everything else that I didn't bring up?

The Essentiality of Basic Science

Ardem Patapoutian (35:42):

I just think that the basic science community is really suffering from decreasing amounts of funding and appreciation of doing basic science. And one of my goals, in addition to this immigrant scientist thing, is to remind people that all medicines start with basic science work. And funding this has mainly been through NIH and it's getting harder and harder for basic scientists to secure funding and I'm really worried about this. And we need to find ways to be okay for people to do basic science. And I'll give you one example. Whenever we make a publication and there's a journalist talking to us or some kind of press coverage, they ask, how is this directly affecting patients? And my work actually is very much related to patients, and I answer that question, but I also say, but it's also important to do science for the science sake because you don't know where the applications are going to come from. And we need to, as a society, encourage and fund and support basic science as the seeds of all these translational work. And I think doing that just kind of highlights that this is important too. We should support it, not just things that right now seem very related to translational that directly helps patients.

Eric Topol (37:16):

Well, I'm so glad you emphasized that because I mean, the PIEZO story is the exemplar. Look what's come of it, what might still come of it. In many respects here you are maybe 15 years into the story and there's still many parts of this that are untold, but if it wasn't for the basic science, we wouldn't have these remarkable and diverse insights. And recently you cited, and I think so many people read about the ‘crown jewel’ NIH, front page New York Times, and how it's under threat because the new NIH director doesn't have a regard for basic science. He's actually, he's confirmed, which is likely, he's an economist, physician economist, never practiced medicine, but he doesn't really have a lot of regard for basic science. But as you point out, almost every drug that we have today came out of NIH basic work. And I mean, not just that, but all the disease insights and treatments and so much.

Eric Topol (38:25):

So this is really unfortunate if we have not just an NIH and other supporting foundations that don't see the priority, the fundamental aspect of basic science to then lead to, as we call translational, and then ultimately the way to promote human health, which is I think what we're all very much focused on ultimately. But you can't do it without getting to first base, and that's what you have done. You served it up and it's a great example. Well, Ardem, it's always a pleasure. This is a first time talking through a podcast. I hope we’ll have many, many visits informally that will complement the ones we've already had, and we will follow the PIEZO work. Obviously, you have had just an exceptional impact, but you're still young and who knows what's next, right? I mean, look what happened to Barry Sharpless. He won here. He won two Nobel prizes, so you never know where things are headed.

Ardem Patapoutian (39:36):

Thank you, Eric, and I really appreciate what you do for the biomedical community. I think it's wonderful through your social media and this podcast, we all appreciate it.

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