Nobel medicine prize goes to research of brain activity

Kostya Manenkov and Stefanie Dazio | October 5, 2026

The Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their research into light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.

The prize was announced on Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, kicking off Nobels week.

The prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $A1.7 million).

Their work was lauded by the committee “for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain”.

“This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries,” the committee wrote on social platform X.

Last year, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries about how the immune system knows to attack germs and not our own bodies. The work by Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi uncovered a key pathway the body uses to keep the immune system in check, called peripheral immune tolerance.

Experts called the findings critical to understanding autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

Monday’s medicine prize is followed by the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday.

After Friday’s peace prize is awarded, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Oct. 12.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organization.