Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology Awarded to Deisseroth, Hegemann, and Nagel for Their Discoveries on Light-Activated Ion Channels and Optogenetics"

My congratulations to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel. We in the neuroscience community have received the news with great excitement.

It is, moreover, a fascinating Nobel Prize, one that celebrates the convergence of disciplines. The story begins with microbiology, with single-celled photosynthetic algae that use light-sensitive proteins to orient themselves and swim towards the light. Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel identified and studied these proteins. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist by training, applied this idea to the brain, with the ultimate aim of one day treating brain disorders with greater precision. Using genetic engineering techniques, his team succeeded in expressing these algal proteins in neurons, making it possible to control their activity using pulses of light. A few years later, they used this idea to control the brain circuits involved in fear and anxiety, whose neurons now responded to light thanks to a protein derived from an alga.

In less than two decades, optogenetics has become a ubiquitous technology in neurophysiology laboratories and has allowed us to push the boundaries between science and science fiction. In laboratory animals, we have managed to control emotions, create false memories or even recover lost memories in models of Alzheimer’s disease. So far, one of its few clinical applications has been the partial restoration of vision in a patient. Perhaps the great promise it has yet to fulfil is precisely one of its founding promises: its ability to treat diseases of the human brain.