Nobel in Medicine goes to Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel for switching brain cells on with light
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet announced on 5 October that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Karl Deisseroth of Stanford and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg. The prize recognises optogenetics. Hegemann and Nagel showed that channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein in a single-celled alga, opens an ion channel when light hits it. Deisseroth put the gene for it into nerve cells, showing that blue light could trigger a nerve signal, and two years later made it work in living mice. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, shared equally.
The method lets researchers switch individual nerve cells on or off in a living brain, rather than inferring their role from correlation. It has become a standard tool for mapping circuits behind movement, memory and mood, and is being tested in treatments for blindness.
There is no treatment you can ask for yet. The result is a reminder that much of medicine begins with basic research on odd organisms: the starting point here was an alga.
Look for the next step, not the prize: trials of light-based therapies in people. The first to watch are in vision, where light-sensitive proteins can be delivered to the eye.
DailyDrop U.K. edition No. 1 · Morning · MON., OCT. 5, 2026