Raül Andero Galí
ICREA Research Professor, Director of Andero Lab and the Rodent Behavioral Core at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and researcher in the Department of Psychobiology and Methodology of Health Sciences at the UAB and at the Carlos III Health Institute, CIBERSAM
Although optogenetics—which allows for the control of cellular activity using light—was initially developed for neuroscience, it is now used in numerous biomedical disciplines, such as cardiology, ophthalmology, and immunology.
Personally, I consider it a great success for neuroscience that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, since this technique has allowed us to take the study of the brain to levels that would have been considered science fiction before its discovery in 2005—such as, for example, turning specific memories on and off in laboratory animals in a matter of milliseconds.