Medicine Nobel awarded for brain ‘switch’ that controls neurons with light: live updates

www.nature.com · 2026-10-05 · by Long Nguyen ·generic
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel win the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on optogenetics, which has revolutionized neuroscience.

Medicine Nobel awarded for brain ‘switch’ that controls neurons with light: live updates

Triptych featuring the 2026 Nobel prize winners in medicine from left to right Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.

Left to right: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were awarded the 2026 Nobel prize in medicine for their work on optogenetics.Credit: L-R Stanford Medicine, Humbold-Universität zu Berlin/Philipp Plum, Robert Emmerich/Universität Würzburg

After being on many scientists’ shortlists for years, optogenetics — a technology that allows researchers to control the brain’s neurons with pulses of light — has been recognized by the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The technique has transformed how neuroscientists study the brain, offering them a way to test cause and effect.

The winners are Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University in California, Peter Hegemann at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel at the University of Würzburg in Germany. They share the prize of 12 million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million).

Deisseroth said that, as a night owl, he had been working late before he received the call from the Nobel committee. “It was a complete surprise,” he told a press conference held by Stanford University today. “I was lying down, just starting to drift off to sleep, and my phone rang at my bedside,” he said. “There were about 30 seconds where I had trouble forming words … but \[it’s\] very exciting and overwhelming, and just delightful.”

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A switch neuroscientists dreamt of

Neuroscientists’ aim is to unpick the brain’s many roles: how it governs feelings, behaviours and bodily functions. To understand how the brain works and how its cells mediate different behaviours, scientists require an approach that can perturb the system with high precision.

“Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of,” said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in the press release announcing the prize.

Working together in the early 2000s, Hegemann and Nagel discovered a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin1,2 in the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which is able to swim towards a light source. In response to blue light, the protein opens to allow charged molecules to flood into cells, creating a tiny electrical charge.

In later work, Deisseroth and his colleagues inserted3 the gene encoding channelrhodopsin into neurons of rodents, and found that it could cause the cells to fire and communicate with other neurons. The technology — a light-controlled ‘switch’ that allowed neuroscientists to alter specific cell types in the neural circuits of living brains — soon came to be known as optogenetics. It revolutionized neuroscience.

“We use light to turn on or off individual cells, even or types of cell or connections from one part of the brain to another. We can turn those on and off with millisecond precision in real time during behaviour, during cognition, and that allows us to see what actually matters for brain function and to start to map function and dysfunction precisely,” said Deisseroth. “It’s a real confluence of engineering and medicine.”

Illuminating the brain

The prizewinners’ work “fundamentally changed how we conduct neuroscience” and has “influenced fields far beyond it in biology, and opened new therapeutic possibilities,” says neuroscientist Rui Costa, who is president and chief executive of the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington. “I first met Karl 23 years ago, and he was already thinking deeply about how to control the activity of specific neurons to understand and alter behaviour. Karl’s commitment not only to discovery, but also to sharing tools and reagents at scale, was equally transformative,” says Costa.

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The discovery and application of channelrhodopsin has led to a diverse ‘optogenetic toolkit’ that allows scientists in different fields to harness cellular activity with light.

Optogenetics has had a great impact on basic science, says Alexander Gottschalk, a neuroscientist at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. “It’s such an easy way, a very precise way, to define which cells should become responsive,” says Gottschalk. “Many people in the field have expected \[this\] for several rounds of Nobels already, but it took until now.”

Into the clinic

Insights provided by optogenetic tools have helped researchers to better understand brain function in health and diseases including depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

There are also efforts to directly apply optogenetics to treat a form of blindness. In trials, it has been used to partially restore vision in people with a genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which causes a gradual death of the light-sensitive cells in the retina. Four biotechnology companies have ongoing trials of optogenetic technologies for retinitis pigmentosa. One of the firms, Nanoscope Therapeutics in Dallas, Texas, is seeking approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for its approach.

Nobel Committee Secretary General Thomas Perlmann speaks to the media in front of a screen displaying the names and photos of the 2026 winners of the Nobel prize in Medicine.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for their discoveries in optogenetics, announced by Nobel Committee secretary-general Thomas Perlmann (right).Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty

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