Briefs · Frontier Science
Three Men Taught Nerve Cells to Answer to Light
The 2026 Medicine Nobel went to three men who taught nerve cells to answer to light — and, in doing so, gave neuroscience its remote control.
Karl Deisseroth of Stanford, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University Berlin and Georg Nagel of Würzburg won on 5 October “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”. The story begins in a pond: Hegemann and Nagel found channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein, in Chlamydomonas, a single-celled alga that swims towards light. In 2005, Deisseroth showed the protein could switch individual neurons on and off with pulses of blue light inside a living brain.
Since then optogenetics has let researchers trace memory, emotion, movement and disease to specific circuits — the beginning, the committee said, of a new era in neuroscience. The three share 12 million Swedish kronor.
Conclusion: optogenetics is not a treatment, but rather a torch — and for the first time, scientists can see the brain by switching it on.
Read the original at Smithsonian Magazine
Summary in our own words. The original belongs to its publisher.