2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel

Beyond the initial discovery, Karl and his lab put an extraordinary amount of effort into making the technique accessible and available for neuroscientists around the world. The impact on the field here is in the distillation, in ensuring it could be applied to manifold questions and disease models. Richly deserved.

I participated in early work in optogenetics in larger brains, and Karl was my postdoc adviser. He is a deeply thoughtful and generous scientist. His book Projections unpacks some of his thinking as to how these tools may unravel and treat a panel of psychiatric conditions. The company MapLight he started is working to make these treatments a reality via ongoing clinical trials https://maplightrx.com/pipeline/

I’ve always been impressed with Deisseroth. Since the early optogenetics days he always was excited to share materials. (I have fond memories of driving back from a visit to Stanford with vectors plucked from their freezer, what MTA!?) And he was eager to promote young scientists not only in his own lab but also in others (like myself) that were innovating in these spaces. And in every talk I’ve heard, he’s shared credit really openly.

There’s a big contrast there to how some scientists operate - hoarding ideas, being cautious in collaboration, demanding credit. I’m so pleased for him!

When I first heard of optogenetics, I figured they had the idea completely backwards. optogenetics uses light from outside the organism to trigger actions inside cells in the organism. I thought the idea would be to put light-emitting genes inside organisms, and then "read out" the underlying biology. I learned only recently that somebody is working on adding fluorescence to cuttlefish to see "when neurons fire" (with spatial info), among other thiings: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-engineere...

Of course my long game is to add cuttlefish-style "pulsing, glowing" tattoos to humans.

Georg Nagel gave the first few biology lectures I had at uni. People were already saying that he was due for the Nobel Prize - I'm happy for him the committee now came to the same conclusion!

The lectures themselves were, unfortunately, quite boring. This was the introductory course for freshmen, covering a lot of material that students ought to have learnt in school already. Much of the time, the professor appeared to be as bored by it as many of the students were, but I guess it had to be done and someone had to do it...

Optogenetics is one of the most scify technologies I ever had the pleasure of working with:

Imagine implanting a light guide and then setting a translucent port to allow a pathogens safe way to couple into nerves deep inside the brain, imagine transient gene therapies that introduce channelrhodopsins and holographic projections that create volumetric excitation patterns.

Seriously, thinking machines are super impressive, but that stuff really alien in its possible applications.

My prediction is that true neural interfaces will be based on light not wires.

It's a rule in the Nobel Foundation's statutes added in 1968, a provision that no more than three persons may share a Nobel prize. In practice no science prize had gone to more than three people before that either. In medicine it usually means one or two key contributors get left out, as with Boyden and Bamberg this year.

How is this done in living brains? Presumably you have to vivisect sufficiently be able to shine light on neurons, or have some sort of probe that does it. At that point how is it easier than electrically stimulating the nerves to generate action potentials?

(To be clear, since it's probably necessary, I'm asking a curiosity-driven question about the mechanism here, not throwing shade on the work. Given it's won the researchers a Nobel prize it's obviously highly significant.)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16116447/ Ed Boyden and Feng Zhang were first and second author, respectively. A real all-star team. Too bad only the PI is awarded (not to say Deisseroth doesn't deserve it, he definitely does)

Also, just like with CRISPR, there were others thinking along the same lines at the same time, but who didn't get the high profile publications: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/he-may-have-inven...

From a theoretical idea Francis Crick had to reality, optogenetics definitely is a huge revolution in the field. We are yet to see its full potential played out. A well deserved Nobel.

Crick’ original challenge: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/controlling-the-b...

He said later: One of the next require- ments(asdiscussedabove)istobeabletoturnthe¢ring of one or more types of neuron on and o¡ inthe alert animal in a rapid manner. The ideal signal would be light, probably at an infrared wavelength to allow the light to penetrate far enough. This seems rather far- fetched but it is conceivable that molecular biologists could engineer a particular cell type to be sensitive to light in this way.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1692710/

It’s rather neat that we can go from wish to mechanism at least sometimes, in this fashion. Lots of hard work and ingenuity in between, and worth celebrating.

As always, I recommend pressing the "Popular information" link in the side menu for these announcements. Well written and interesting explanations of the science being awarded.

Haven't heard of optogenetics in a while. I could never decide if it was actually useful for either basic science or medicine or a toy.

Looking at the basic science results I could not decide if they were bringing in really novel understanding or basically repeating a lot of the old electrical stimulation results.

I do remember a staggering amount of money was pumped into the field and it was super trendy in the 2010s.

I learned today that the initial Nobel's will stated that people should be rewarded for the discoveries made in the preceding year, but this quite often isn't followed which is understandable given the enormity of amount of work that goes into modern-day discoveries that are considered for Nobel prizes.

Congratulations what an amazing achievement!

Many people involved in optogenetics, it must have been hard to select 3.

Congratulations to the winners!

From my understanding, this discovery is on the level of what transistors were for electronics - unlocking a completely new way to understand and design the electronic circuits, which later on enabled the rise of computing.

Since compared to biology our computing is still highly primitive, it seems like next step in compute power will be biological and quantum computing.

What about Ed Boyden!

The Nobel Prize went to optogenetics.

Optogenetics allows you to control neurons with light.

Miesenböck excluded!

I wonder if Prof. Dr. Boyden was excluded because of his past interactions with Epstein. https://fancycomma.com/2026/05/23/science-in-the-epstein-fil...

how hard is it with AI to do an optogenesis surgery on some mice and do some experiments with neural networks? would the AI guide you step by step, tell you where to cut, what to put where? I have no medical background.

Another Nobel Prize for optics. Many Nobel Prizes have gone to optics in recent years.

What strikes me from djoshea's firsthand account is that the Nobel here rewards tool-building and distribution, not just the initial channelrhodopsin discovery — making optogenetics usable worldwide is what turned a neat finding into a field. The three-person rule discussion is the inevitable shadow: Boyden/Zhang/Bamberg contributions show how much modern neuroscience is team-built, yet the prize forces a single-PI narrative. lamename's fiber-vs-electrode explanation is the clearest one-liner for why it matters: same probe, but genetic targeting means you stimulate only the cell type you care about instead of everything nearby.

Press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-releas...