Hello children, if you are interested in science here I have a piece of information that this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two American medical doctors named as Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka, for their work on a very interesting topic, and which we experience daily.

Their four-decade long work has revealed how the body responds to the smells, sights, flavours and threats of the outside world. It is common that when you sense an unusual smell, sudden piercing of light in the eyes, unpleasant sights, unacceptable flavours, colours or a shadow that seems as if somebody is threatening and approaching you, you always try to fight with courage or run out of fear. It happens because when your senses perceive an environmental stress, such as danger or threat or as described above, the cells in your nervous and hormonal systems are awaken and they start to work closely together to prepare the body for action. This is referred to as the ‘Fight or flight phenomenon’. This elicits instantaneous and simultaneous responses throughout the body.

In this situation you would have noticed that:

•    Your skin muscles contract, raising the hair on the surface of skin;

•    Your sweat glands contract, squeezing the sweat out on the skin surface;

•    Your lungs heaves and its muscles relax that increases respiration;

•    Your heart muscles beat faster and blood circulate through the brain at a faster rate;

•    Your liver produces /releases sugar into the blood stream;

•    Your fat cells release fatty acids;

•    Your flow of blood to the digestive system is decreased;

•    Your pupils of the eyes widen.

Though we will not go into the work of these two scientists that I have mentioned above, I will discuss know the science of instantaneous and simultaneous responses in our biological systems when there is fear, scare and terror of the kind described above.

Suffice to say that there exist molecular sensors called G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) in the body. Receptor, or you may call it receiver, is an organ adapted to receive any action and react in response to the abovementioned causes of fight or flight through some chemicals called hormones, and specifically known as adrenaline etc. Hormones are secreted by the body and on reaching the target organs, they exercise physiological actions by way of the sympathetic nervous system. It is called G-protein because it is attached with Guanine component of DNA. It is involved in transmitting signals outside the cell. There is a huge variety of such receptors which cause individual organs to react in different ways to the same stimulant.

GPCRs are the largest and the most important family of receptor proteins in human body. They play roles in all biological processes and in some unfavourable conditions may trigger the start of diseases such as heart, obesity, diabetes insipidus (excessive urination), neurosympathetic disorders, inflammation and even cancer (Media release by Monash University on 12 October 2012).

I think this discovery of GPCRs function is so important that it should call for rewriting of some chapters of medical and pharmacological books and designing of new drugs, too, so as to make them act through GPCRs for quick relief.

Now, few words about Nobel Prize. It is awarded every year in the month of October for outstanding inventions, which in the long run would prove to benefit mankind. The system of awarding Nobel Prize was established by a Swedish philanthropist called Alfred Nobel in 1895. He was a chemist, engineer and inventor.

The prizes are awarded in the field of science, medicine, literature, economics and peace. Nobel Prize recipient is called Nobel Laureate, and gets a gold medal, diploma and a handsome award money in cash which is shared among the recipients who should not be more than three. Most of the Nobel Prizes have been awarded to American and European scientists.

Pakistan boasts of only one Nobel laureate, Prof. Abdus Salam, in Physics, which he shared with Profs. Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinbeg in 1979 for the contribution to the theory of the Unified electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

Would you also like to become Nobel Laureate? God bless you in your efforts.