The Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their research into light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.
The prize was announced at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, kicking off Nobels week. Their work was lauded by the committee “for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain”.
“This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries,” the committee wrote on social platform X.
Professor Deisseroth is a US neuroscientist currently based at Stanford University, while Professor Hegemann and biophysicist Professor Nagel are both from Germany, based at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Wurzburg respectively.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about £900,000).
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