The 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel

The 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their studies on optogenetics.

The other Nobels

Tomorrow, Tuesday, the prize for Physics will be awarded and the one for Chemistry on Wednesday. To find out the winner of Literature we will have to wait until Thursday at 1pm. The following day it will be the turn of Peace. The awards season will close on Monday 12 October with Economy.

Last year the winners were Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, involved in the study of the immune system. “The immune system – explained the Nobel committee responsible for choosing the winners – is very powerful and needs brakes, otherwise it risks attacking our own organs”.

Last year's award

"Brunkow, Ramsdell and Sakaguchi - we read again in the motivation for the award - have made important discoveries on the peripheral tolerance that prevents the immune system from damaging the organism. Their discoveries have laid the foundations for a new field of research that has allowed the development of new treatments, for example for cancer and autoimmune diseases".

Each year the Nobel winners share a prize of 12 million Swedish crowns (1.1 million euros) and a gold medal featuring the likeness of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and entrepreneur who patented dynamite in 1867 but sought to go down in history for reasons other than the discovery of a new explosive.

The ceremony in Stockholm

The prizes, as indicated by Nobel in his will, have been awarded since 1901 to scientists who "have contributed most to the good of humanity". Every December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896, the King of Sweden hosts the laureates for a banquet and ball in Stockholm.

Among the 633 overall winners, only 68 are women, just over 10%. The imbalance is particularly felt in scientific Nobels, even if the proportion has started to rise since the year 2000.

How winners are chosen

In his will Nobel designated the institutions responsible for choosing the winners: the Karolinska Institutet for Medicine and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for Physics and Chemistry.

Immediately after the award, the process of selecting the prizes for the following year begins. Thousands of experts, university professors, scientists and past Nobel winners are asked to name one.

The institutions responsible for making the choice appoint a Nobel Committee from within them which screens the candidates and generally, with very few exceptions, manages to avoid leaks of information. Even predictions and Nobel Prize winners are almost always wrong-footed. The complete list of candidates is made public only after 50 years on the Nobel Foundation website.

The winner is chosen the same morning as the announcement and receives a phone call from the selection committee in Stockholm giving him the news. For American scientists, the majority of those awarded, the phone rings in the middle of the night, creating quite a stir in the house.