2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann for work on optogenetics
Scientific American · LC · trust 52/100
Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann developed optogenetics, which uses light and genetics to control individual cells
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann for their discovery of rhodopsin and optogenetics , the ability to control cells using light and genetics.
Optogenetics allows scientists to use light to switch cells on and off. Using light-sensing proteins called rhodopsins, optogenetics enables precise targeting of cells, such as brain cells, to understand what they do.
The technique has revolutionized neuroscience by opening up the brain's activity to scientists in ways previously impossible. As Deisseroth explained in Scientific American in a 2010 article , the brain is of such great complexity, that "neuroscientists lack a deep grasp of what the brain is really doing—of how specific activity patterns within specific brain cells ultimately give rise to thoughts, feelings and memories."
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Optogenetics reveals how specific neurons and neural pathways govern behavior, such as eating, sociability and aggression. Controlling and monitoring individual cells has also illuminated neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's and epilepsy.
Abdel El Manira, a distinguished professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and a member of the Nobel committee, said at the prize announcement that optogenetics' impacts extend beyond our understanding of the healthy brain.
"It has also helped reveal how specific brain circuits are disrupted, with implications for conditions such as blindness, depression, addiction, and dementia. Yet, despite these extraordinary advances, the brain still holds countless mysteries, with much more left to learn and discover and optogenetics has given us a powerful means to take on these challenges."
Looking to the future, scientists believe optogenetics could hold therapeutic applications. For example, some early clinical trial work suggests optogenetic therapy could help restore sight in people with retinitis pigmentosa , an inherited form of progressive vision loss that causes light-sensing cells in the eye to die. Clinicians can inject DNA encoding for a light-sensing protein into retinal neurons, enabling them to activate and send electrical signals to the brain when exposed to light—bypassing the dead and damaged cells.
Deisseroth is a professor at Stanford University; Hegemann is a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin, in Germany; and Nagel is a professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. The award-winning work was done at Stanford, the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics, both in Germany.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, first given in 1901, has been awarded 116 times to 232 winners for innovations in medicine and biological sciences. Over the years, these have included the discovery of insulin, penicillin, blood groups, the molecular structure of DNA; understanding biological processes such as how neurons work, how malaria spreads, the role of human papilloma viruses in cervical cancer; as well as for treatments such as in vitro fertilization and the first antibiotic for tuberculosis.
In recent years, laureates have won the prize for their role in research leading to the development of the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 , awarded in 2023, the discovery of “microRNA,” or small RNA molecules that help decipher our DNA (2024), and peripheral immune tolerance, or how the immune system helps regulate itself , in 2025.
Editor’s Note (10/5/26): This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
Jackie Flynn Mogensen is a breaking news reporter at Scientific American . Before joining SciAm, she was a science reporter at Mother Jones, where she received a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications in 2024. Mogensen holds a master’s degree in environmental communication and a bachelor’s degree in earth sciences from Stanford University. She is based in New York City.
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