Three scientists win 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Karolinska Institute announced on October 5 local time that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists, according to CLS, Yicai and China News Service. China News Service and Caixin named the laureates as Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel. Caixin reported the award cites “their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”, while China News Service described it in Chinese as an award for discovering light-gated ion channels and founding optogenetics. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 8 , 9 ]

Caixin reported the announcement was made at 11:30 local Swedish time, 17:30 Beijing time. Huxiu reported that Deisseroth is at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States, Hegemann at Humboldt University Berlin and Nagel at the University of Würzburg; Caixin described Deisseroth as an American scientist and Hegemann and Nagel as German. Chinese outlets transliterated the names differently: China News Service and Jiemian wrote 卡尔·戴塞洛斯, Caixin wrote 卡尔·戴赛罗斯 and a later China News Service report wrote 卡尔·戴塞罗思. [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 9 , 10 ]

Huxiu said traditional neuroscience research relied on electrical stimulation or pharmacology, which could only show correlation between neuron activity and behaviour rather than causation. Optogenetics, it said, offers cell-type-specific control at millisecond precision that can switch particular neurons on or off. The outlet traced the key finding to work on the single-celled alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, where Hegemann found unusually fast light sensing and proposed a protein that both senses light and acts as an ion channel; with Nagel, expressing candidate algal genes in Xenopus oocytes, he found blue light directly opens channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) and produces a cation current. [ 10 ]

Huxiu reported that Hegemann and Nagel proposed ChR2 as a light-controlled cell tool in 2003, that Deisseroth introduced the ChR2 gene into rat neurons and confirmed blue light could trigger action potentials at millisecond speed in a landmark 2005 paper, that the three formally named optogenetics in 2006 and achieved light control of neurons in living mice in 2007. Scientists later co-expressed ChR2 with archaeal halorhodopsin for two-wavelength, two-directional control, and in 2012 Deisseroth and Susumu Tonegawa used optogenetics to show that a specific cluster of neurons is the physical substrate of memory, Huxiu said. [ 10 ]

According to Huxiu, the optogenetics toolbox has kept expanding and is used in thousands of laboratories worldwide to map neural circuits for pain, thirst, feeding, reward and social behaviour, to study circadian rhythms and immune fever mechanisms and to examine heart-brain interaction. Clinically, it said, the technique is being explored for restoring sight by delivering ChR2 to retinal ganglion cells and for improving cochlear implants, and it helps analyse circuit abnormalities in depression, anxiety and Alzheimer's disease to provide drug and intervention targets. Huxiu said the breakthrough grew out of basic curiosity about algal phototaxis and energy conversion in salt-lake archaea. [ 10 ]

The documents contain no statement from the laureates, no comment from the Karolinska Institute beyond the citation, no prize amount and no ceremony date. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]