The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for their discoveries on light-activated ion channels and optogenetics. Deisseroth works at Stanford University; Hegemann at Humboldt University of Berlin; Nagel at the University of Würzburg. To understand the discovery, one must start with the single-celled alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. To orient itself toward light, it uses special proteins called channelrhodops
