When Karl Deisseroth was studying to be a doctor in the 1990s, he took a rotation working with psychiatric patients. It would start him down a path of discovery about how the brain works that would eventually lead him to become a Nobel laureate.
The brain is billions of fragile, extremely vulnerable, transparent, very fast-acting cells. It’s a very challenging system to study, and of course, buried within the skull and doing very complex things … I was very much impressed with the magnitude of the challenge.
Deisseroth, today a professor in the schools of medicine and engineering at Stanford University in the US, spoke to The Conversation Weekly podcast about his research, and the experience of being jointly awarded the 2026 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine with two German scientists, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.
Deisseroth’s contribution was for pioneering the field of optogenetics, the ability to control nerve cells with light to investigate how their activity shapes our feelings and behaviour. To do this, he used a gene from a single-celled pond algae, discovered by Hegemann and Nagel.
We were able to find cells that were involved in hunger and thirst, basic survival drives. We were able to identify cells and pathways controlling aggression and defensiveness and parenting, nurturing of the young … all the different parts of anxiety … memory, motivation. The general applicability became clear over the subsequent years.
Karl Deisseroth has received funding from the NIH and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was the founder of MapLight Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company.
(The Conversation/ARC)