Nobel prize for medicine goes to trio who developed optogenetics

The 2026 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for the development of techniques for controlling genes with light, known as optogenetics. Peter Hegemann, at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, wondered how a single-celled alga, called Chlamydomonas, can swim towards light. In the 2000s, he and Georg Nagel, at the University of Würzburg, also in Germany, discovered the key to this is a light-sensitive protein that acts as a switch, opening a channel that lets ions flow through the protein when exposed to light.

The protein was called channel-rhodopsin. This is a breaking news story and will be updated.