{"id":462,"date":"2026-10-05T13:04:43","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T13:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=462"},"modified":"2026-10-05T13:04:43","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T13:04:43","slug":"nobel-medicine-2026-optogenetics-deisseroth-hegemann-nagel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=462","title":{"rendered":"NOBEL GOES TO THE SCIENTISTS WHO FLIP BRAIN CELLS ON WITH LIGHT! | Pond algae to Stanford lab \u2014 optogenetics trio splits $1.2M, and the cures are still in the queue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Stockholm just handed the first Nobel of the year to the folks who turned a flashlight into a brain switch. American <strong>Karl Deisseroth<\/strong> and Germans <strong>Peter Hegemann<\/strong> and <strong>Georg Nagel<\/strong> won the <strong>2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine<\/strong> on Monday for \u201cdiscoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/business\/healthcare-pharmaceuticals\/deisseroth-hegemann-nagelwin-2026-nobel-medicine-prize-2026-10-05\/\">Reuters<\/a> reported.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis method makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain,\u201d said <strong>Thomas Perlmann<\/strong>, Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet. The trio \u2014 ages <strong>54, 71 and 73<\/strong> \u2014 split <strong>12 million Swedish crowns (about $1.2 million)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The origin story starts with pond scum. In the early 1990s Hegemann studied how the alga <em>Chlamydomonas<\/em> reacts to light in half a millisecond. Nagel injected its genes into frog eggs and found <strong>channelrhodopsin-2<\/strong>, a light-sensitive ion channel. In 2003 they showed it could fire electrical impulses in human and hamster cells; two years later Deisseroth made it work in rat neurons at Stanford, and the field got its name in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>Labs now use it to probe schizophrenia, Alzheimer\u2019s, Parkinson\u2019s, epilepsy and addiction in animal models, and it has been used to partially restore vision in blind patients with retinitis pigmentosa. The reality check: the most advanced therapies \u2014 MapLight\u2019s autism program and Nanoscope\u2019s vision drug \u2014 are \u201cstill some time away\u201d from patients. Physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics prizes follow this week; Peace lands Friday.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sources:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/business\/healthcare-pharmaceuticals\/deisseroth-hegemann-nagelwin-2026-nobel-medicine-prize-2026-10-05\/\">Reuters<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pond algae to Stanford lab \u2014 optogenetics trio splits $1.2M, and the cures are still in the queue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/bb-nobel-optogenetics-1005.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}