{"id":245554,"date":"2026-10-17T01:37:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/using-light-to-control-brain-cells-explains-how-he-made-his-nobel-winning-discovery"},"modified":"2026-10-17T01:37:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:37:12","slug":"using-light-to-control-brain-cells-explains-how-he-made-his-nobel-winning-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/using-light-to-control-brain-cells-explains-how-he-made-his-nobel-winning-discovery","title":{"rendered":"Using light to control brain cells explains how he made his Nobel-winning discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/using-light-to-control-brain-cells-explains-how-he-made-his-nobel-winning-discovery.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/medicine\/2026\/press-release\/\">2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine<\/a> honored <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/medicine\/2026\/deisseroth\/facts\/\">Karl Deisseroth<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/medicine\/2026\/hegemann\/facts\/\">Peter Hegemann<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/medicine\/2026\/nagel\/facts\/\">Georg Nagel<\/a> for their work developing optogenetics \u2013 a technique that allows researchers to control the activity of neurons with light.<\/p>\n<p>The Conversation Weekly podcast talked to Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, about his journey developing optogenetics and its potential to treat a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions. What follows is an edited transcript of the podcast.<\/p>\n<p>Take us back to the early 1990s. You\u2019re training to be a doctor and you start a rotation working with psychiatric patients. What questions about the brain did that raise for you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine honored Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work developing optogenetics \u2013 a technique that allows researchers to control the activity of neurons with light. The Conversation Weekly podcast talked to Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, about his journey developing optogenetics and its potential [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}