2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel | Hacker News Reader

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

nobelprize.org

143 pointslode48 comments

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

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 know that there are some works regarding the feasibility of this technique for optical cochlear implants. How is this going on? Last time I spoke with one of the large CI vendors they were rather sceptical

I’m not sure, seems like an active area though.

https://www.centerwatch.com/clinical-trials/listings/NCT0511...

https://www.entandaudiologynews.com/features/ent-features/po...

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!

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...

Funny that university of Wuerzburg didn’t make it into the group of German “excellence universities” a few days ago and today they have one more Nobelprize laureate (15 in total now, among others Roentgen who discovered the x-rays).

Nagel made these findings before he moved to Würzburg though, at Max Planck Institute for Biophysics.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12089443/

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.

Calcium imaging of neuronal activity (see, e.g., https://alleninstitute.org/education-resources/how-scientist...) is a thing, and has been for a while. It does something like what you said: neurons that have been genetically modified glow briefly, which can be picked up by microscopy. It has many advantages (and some drawbacks) compared to more traditional electrical recording techniques.

"using light to read out from organisms" has been around since basically GFP. If you are looking for dynamics, some early work was done by, e.g. Alice Ting.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.211564598 (2001)

sticking fluorescence (and luminescence) inside an organism of choice is not particularly hard! just add a GFP gene and you're done. if you can do any genetics at all, this is one of the first things to try.

Of course, if you want see the fluorescence in a live organism it must be transparent -- hence the popularity of zebrafish embryos in evo devo.

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.

Didn't know the 3 person rule was that recent, but they can always spread it across multiple years. Like Heisenberg, Dirac, and Schrödinger all got it for pretty much the same thing (inventing quantum mechanics) but in 1932 (Heisenberg) and 1933 (the other two). They could have gotten 6 people into the 2 years if it came to that. They also sometimes come up with reasons to give someone the prize. Like Einstein was world famous for relativity theory, but for some reason they didn't want to award the prize for that, so they gave it to him for his less famous work on the photoelectric effect.

I feel really bad for Prof. Dr. Boyden.

He kinda disappeared after the Epstein stuff as far as I can tell?

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.

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.)

Yes you put in a "probe" (fiber optic), just like when you stimulate with an electrode. The difference is electricity stimulates everything, while the light can be targeted, not by what it illuminates but what responds* because...

Ahead of time, you either use viral tools or other genetic modifications to make specific cell types express the photorecrptor.

*there is an effect of light/heat that all cells are subject to, and good experiments try to control for this as best they can

I see, that does sound like a powerful technique. Thanks!

you also have to genetically modify the organism first, so, unlikely that you can do this to yourself unless you want to nuke half your brain with some sort of viral delivery method

theory- light leaks through retinal neron in eyes. using retinal scan that is used to neasure neoropathy for diabetics patience or glucoma testing machine concept.

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.

Optogenetics is an incredible tool for probing and dissecting the activity of neurons within neural circuits. It’s gives enormous power to scientists to perform more causal manipulations and test ideas more concretely than observation or genetic manipulations alone. I’m not sure why it would be considered a toy, though the utility depends on what you do with it. So far this has been primarily limited to understanding the brain but there’s work to develop clinical therapies using optogenetics as well. I collaborated with Karl extensively in my PhD work with some others in the comments here. It’s exciting to see his work get this recognition.

Lets put it this way: prior to optogenetics, you had absolutely no way to answer questions like: "What happens during this behavior if we block dopamine at the exact moment we think dopamine is important for this behavior?" without trying our best to put a tiny electrode in the exact spot where we think dopamine neurons are found in the brain (on the micron scale), and pray that your stimulation exactly only hits dopamine neurons locally and nothing else (a technical impossibility).

now replace dopamine with any cell type you can think of in the brain, and you can even be more clever and do genetic tricks like "only this type of cell in this part of the brain that only receive input from this other part of the brain, but not others"

it really truly unlocked the entire era of neuroscience we are in, with the focus on circuits.

I predict the next likely era after circuits is networks, and the cool thing about opto is the scalability and the way we can precisely control and shape light to ultimately control networks.

it's a great tool for molecular elucidations. there's still a big gray area as to the interpretation of some results in the context of terms such as "memory" or various feelings, but the optogenetics framework is undoubtedly the most impressive interface to the brain ever created

There's a new strategy for treating loss of photoreceptors in the retina: reprogram fibroblasts with optogenetics to turn them into new photoreceptors. NEJM just had an article on this.

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.

It could be in the future but its not yet. Optogenetics has just merely been one more albeit powerful tool in the neuroscience toolkit and have generally not been impressed with how useful (or not) it has been..

I think its hard to measure the impact directly, but I'd say it has an enormous indirect effect on neuroscience that is bigger than anything yet I think.

You have to imagine, before opto, EVERYTHING in neuroscience was either genetic or observational, nothing really good with manipulating circuit function directly except for the only real intervention we had - ablation of an entire region without any specificity, especially with regards to passing axons.

Now, I literally expect any neuro paper that even touches behavior or circuits to have some sort of validation with opto, or it's harder for me to believe.

Maybe there's a bit of an over reliance on it in my above comment, but if you have a better causal tool to suggest, be my guest.

Congratulations what an amazing achievement!

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

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.

The Nobel Prize went to optogenetics.

Optogenetics allows you to control neurons with light.

good bot

Miesenböck excluded!

Schmidhuber excluded!

seems a bit of a stretch

What about Ed Boyden!

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...

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

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.

This isn't something you need AI for! there's tons of methods papers out there.

Here's an overview from Karl himself: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6814250/

And here's a step by step example protocol: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3490315/

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

Thanks! We've added it to the top of the thread.

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.

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