Stanford University scientist Dr. Karl Deisseroth, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, joined California Tonight to discuss his groundbreaking work in a revolutionary field in neuroscience that holds promise for treating conditions from autism to schizophrenia.

Optogenetics, the field for which Deisseroth and two colleagues were honored, uses light to both map and control very specific parts of the brain. He explained, “It’s the opposite of how you normally think about imaging. We think about using light to collect information, but this is using light to make things happen, to control things. The beauty of that is that we can make it very precise, much more precise than an electrode or medication could be. And we do this, here’s the twist, we borrow a gene from a single-celled organism, a microbe that happens to make a beautiful little protein, a little biomolecule that’s a light-activated regulator of electricity.”