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

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

The prize money this year is equivalent to about US$1.2 million, which will be shared by Deisseroth, a 54-year-old ⁠American, Hegemann, a 71-year-old German, and Nagel, a 73-year-old German.

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 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 October 12. (AP & Reuters)




Edited by Thomas McAlinden