Nobel Laureate Karl Deisseroth Explains the Discovery of Optogenetics
Nobel Laureate Karl Deisseroth explains how optogenetics uses light to control individual neurons, allowing scientists to identify the specific cells governing behaviors like hunger, aggression, and anxiety.
Newsnibs Staff
- 2026-10-17
- Updated 7:01 AM UTC
(Stanford University, USA)
The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded Thursday to Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University along with Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for developing optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control the activity of individual neurons. In a podcast interview published the same day, Deisseroth traced the work back to the early 1990s, when he was training as a psychiatrist and became convinced that a lack of cellular-level understanding was holding back treatment of neuropsychiatric disease.
Deisseroth tested the approach by inserting a gene from single-celled algae into rodent neurons. That gene codes for channelrhodopsin-2, a protein that opens in response to light and triggers the neuron to fire. Researchers first demonstrated the technique in living mice in 2004. By 2007 they had confirmed it could control the behavior of freely moving mammals, not just cells in a dish.
Since then the method has let scientists identify which neurons govern specific behaviors, including hunger, aggression and anxiety, by switching those cells on and off with light and watching what the animal does.
Deisseroth also described two ways the research has moved into clinical use. The first, which he called direct optogenetics, applies the light-sensing technique itself to patients. In 2021 it restored light sensitivity to a person with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease.
The second, indirect optogenetics, uses findings from optogenetics research to design targeted drugs rather than applying the light-based method directly. Deisseroth said this approach has produced a medication for schizophrenia now in trials that are moving into their final stages, along with work on a treatment for autism.
Photo by Sandip Kalal on Unsplash
