Let there be light: on the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine

The first of the Nobel announcements has come, heralding the season of celebrating the fruits of the perennial human endeavour to know more and use that knowledge to benefit people. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegeman and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics ”. True to Alfred Bernhard Nobel’s aim of annually recognising those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”, this year’s Nobel went to people who shone a light, literally, on the brain, providing a quantum leap in understanding how it functions. In essence, if the brain is a puppeteer pulling the strings, the body is the marionette. The dexterity of the puppeteer is obvious, but her methods, often not.