A neuroscientist won the Nobel for optogenetics, a way to switch single brain cells on and off with light and see what each one does.
Practice puzzle. It does not touch your streak or today's stats.
Kept 'light'? That is how it works, and it is where the name comes from, but the prize was for the technique, and the technique is called optogenetics. Kept 'brain' or 'cells'? That is where it works. Kept 'switch'? That is what it does. The five is who, what, and what for. This one really happened. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and psychiatry who also treats patients, missed the call from the Nobel committee at 12:27 in the morning on Monday 5 October. Seconds later his wife, the neuroscientist Michelle Monje, got a call: 'May we speak with Karl?' He shares the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg. Optogenetics puts light-sensitive proteins into nerve cells so that a flash of light can turn single cells on or off, which lets scientists test what each one does. In a video Stanford posted that morning, he told his daughters Sophie, 10, and Emma, 13, and then his son Hudson, still in his pyjamas. 'Dad, you've won all the prizes!' Sophie said.