Daily briefing: Medicine Nobel prize goes to optogenetics

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Medicine Nobel for optogenetics

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work in optogenetics — a technology that allows researchers to control the brain’s neurons with pulses of light. In the early 2000s, Hegemann and Nagel discovered a light-sensitive protein — channelrhodopsin — in an alga that swims towards light. 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 inserted the gene encoding channelrhodopsin into neurons, and found that it could cause the cells to fire and communicate with other neurons.

Nature | 8 min read

Learn about optogenetics from laureate Karl Deisseroth himself in this video lecture from 2013. (iBiology | 38 min watch)

‘What took them so long?’

After 15 years of covering the Nobel prizes for Nature, I no longer bother trying to predict who will win — in part because optogenetics has been a front runner for so many years. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” neuroscientist Michael Häusser told me earlier today. “What took them so long?” The wait might have been because the direct application of optogenetics to human disease and biology has emerged only in the last few years. For example, the technique has been harnessed as an experimental therapy to partially restore vision in people with retinitis pigmentosa. “It’s become clear that optogenetics has enormous therapeutic potential,” Häusser says.

Ewen Callaway, Nature reporter

Notable quotable

“I immediately knew that optogenetics was going to have an unprecedented impact on neuroscience because it was a technology that virtually all neuroscientists had been waiting for, one way or another, consciously or not.”

In 2015, neurosurgeon Ivan Soltesz and a host of other optogenetics leaders reflected on progress since a seminal 2005 paper by Deisseroth and Nagel, alongside Edward Boyden, Feng Zhang and Ernst Bamberg. (Nature Neuroscience | 50 min read)

Reference: Nature Neuroscience paper (from 2005)

News

One flawed study swayed Prozac evidence

A single clinical trial of children in Iran might have wrongly swayed medical evidence in favour of using Prozac (fluoxetine) to treat depression in children and adolescents. A group of researchers are now calling that trial’s findings into question, and suggest that the evidence for Prozac’s recommendation in paediatric clinical guidelines should be reevaluated. It’s rare to find such a clear example of a single flawed study affecting the result of systematic reviews in medicine, says psychiatrist and study co-author Florian Naudet. The trial in question reported “the kind of effect size you only get if you ask people whether they prefer chocolate or faeces”, says clinical psychotherapist Martin Plöderl.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods paper

Skull evidence points to servant sacrifice

A re-analysis of evidence from ancient tombs bolsters a theory that the servants of early Egyptian kings were killed when their monarch died. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie proposed the idea in the 1920s, after excavating the burial sites of several rulers and finding other bodies in surrounding graves. But at the time, he could find no evidence of injury on the remains. Using modern techniques, forensic archaeologist Roselyn Campbell has identified signs of potentially lethal trauma on 18 skulls taken from the site, which appear to have been caused by a flat, wide object.

The Guardian | 4 min read

Reference: Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology paper

Image of the week

Features & opinion

The silicon war machine

Two new books examine how “the monopoly once held by governments over the most advanced technologies is weakening”, writes reviewer Chris Stokel-Walker. Both Bytes and Bullets, by former US state department official Steve Feldstein, and Valley of Death, by security-focused journalist Sharon Weinberger, examine the power shift from states to a small number of companies and their owners. That shift “helps to explain why the contest for technological supremacy is becoming more and more crowded and unpredictable”, Stokel-Walker writes.

Nature | 9 min read

At what age do we become conscious?

Researchers are using new kinds of brain-scanning tools to investigate how babies experience the world, both inside and outside the womb. For example, a foetal magnetoencephalography machine can non-invasively detect the faint traces of brain activity inside a pregnant person’s abdomen, giving researchers the ability to observe and even test a fetus’s cognitive development. “I really see it as a frontier area in consciousness science,” says neuroscientist Joel Frohlich.

The New York Times | 10 min read

The real-world physics of science fiction

In the latest episode of Nature hits the books, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz joins host Benjamin Thompson to discuss his latest novel, Ply. Set in a futuristic New York City, the book explores whether quantum physics could be used to unravel the fabric of space-time itself. To inform the novel’s central technology — a fantastical Wakefield accelerator — Diaz visited particle physicist Edda Gschwendtner at CERN to learn about her work. “I spent over a week there, 150 metres underground,” he says. “That was an intellectual adventure that really changed my life.”

Nature Podcast | 32 min listen

Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music, or use the RSS feed.

On Friday, Leif Penguinson was exploring the boardwalks that meander through the Felsenmeer — the sea of stones — in Germany. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, chief editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Jacob Smith

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