‘What took them so long?’ This year’s medicine Nobel winner is overdue

I’ve covered the Nobel prizes for Nature for the past 15 years — but there are so many potentially Nobel-worthy discoveries that as the awards near it can feel like a waste of time trying to anticipate just one or two.

Part of the reason I feel that way is illustrated by today’s winner of the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine, optogenetics. Its foundational work was done two decades ago, in the early 2000s, and the 2026 award honours three scientists: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel. For years, as Nobel week approached, my colleague — who profiled Deisseroth for Nature in back in 2013 — and I would ponder if this was finally going to be the year for optogenetics, which has transformed how neuroscientists understand the brain.

It turns out I wasn’t alone. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” Michael Häusser, a neuroscientist at Hong Kong University and University College London, told me this afternoon. “What took them so long?”

Häusser reminded me that optogenetics won its first major award, the Brain Prize, in 2013. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which is limited to three awardees, that award also recognized three other optogenetics pioneers: Edward Boyden, Gero Miesenböck and Ernst Bamburg.

Häusser thinks the Nobel Committee may have taken so long to recognize the field because the direct application of optogenetics to human disease and biology has emerged only in the past few years.