Nobel medicine prize goes to US, German scientists

OPTOGENETICS: The trio’s research opened a new era in neuroscience, unraveling the pathways that lead to behavior and disease, the institute said

The Nobel Prize in medicine was yesterday awarded to three scientists who created a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works.

Karl Deisseroth, 54, Peter Hegemann, 71, and Georg Nagel, 73, have carried out research into light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.

The Nobel Assembly lauded their work and said the method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries.

Karolinska Institute neuroscience professor Abdel El Manira, right, speaks in front of a screen illustrating light-gated ion channels and displaying portraits of German scientists Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann during the announcement of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at the institute in Stockholm yesterday.

Photo: AFP

The assembly said Deisseroth is based at Stanford University in California, while Hegemann is at Humboldt University in Berlin and Nagel at the University of Wurzburg, also in Germany.

Optogenetics opened what the Nobel assembly called a new era in neuroscience, the discovery of a light-controlled switch to turn on and off nerve cells and circuits in the brain to better learn how it works — to start unraveling the pathways that lead to behavior and disease.

It started when Hegemann explored how a single-celled type of green algae can swim toward light. He and Nagel discovered a particular protein that, when illuminated by blue light, opens a channel to create an electrical impulse. Putting that protein into other cells makes them light-sensitive.

Karl Deisseroth, one of the three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, answers questions at home in Stanford, California, yesterday.

Photo: AP

Deisseroth then worked with the gene that controls that protein to create a light-controlled switch for nerve cells in the brains of living mice.

“It’s a very precise set of tools for doing experiments about how the brain works that are pretty hard to do any other way,” the University of Pittsburgh’s Jeremy Berg said.

He was at the National Institutes of Health in the early 2000s when it awarded Deisseroff major funding for “this vision of optogenetics that was pretty much spot-on the way it played out.”

Deisseroth, a self-described night owl, said he was up late in his northern California home working on papers and e-mailing his students. He had just gone to lie down when he got the call from the Nobel Assembly.

“No real sleep was achieved,” he told The Associated Press in a phone call an hour after the announcement.

He said the next task on his to-do list was to pack school lunches for his children, who were still sound asleep.

Thomas Perlmann, the secretary of the medicine committee, said he was able to reach all three winners.

The prize was announced at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about US$1.2 million).

Last year, the prize went to three scientists researching the immune system.