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1 update, 6 October 2026.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2026 was awarded on 5 October 2026 to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for discoveries concerning light gated ion channels and optogenetics, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said. Optogenetics lets researchers switch the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain on or off using light, and the technique is now used in laboratories worldwide to study how the brain works. Deisseroth is American while Hegemann and Nagel are German; the announcement opened Nobel Prize week, with the physics prize following on 6 October.