The 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth

Together with a US researcher, the two scientists will be honored for their discovery of optogenetics. It makes visible how nerve cells work and revolutionized research.

Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel receive the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Photo: Steffen Trumpf/dpa

Stockholm. This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to the two Germans Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel as well as the US researcher Karl Deisseroth. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that their discoveries in the field of optogenetics will be honored.

The award is worth twelve million Swedish crowns (the equivalent of around $1.2 million), which the three scientists share. Hegemann is a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Nagel is a professor in Würzburg and Deisseroth teaches at the American Stanford University.

In the early 1990s, Hegemann investigated how organisms in the single-celled algae genus Chlamydomonas reacted extremely quickly to light - faster than any biological system known at the time and significantly faster than the human eye-brain connection.

His hypothesis: A single protein captures light and at the same time opens an ion channel. Together with Nagel, he demonstrated this - the researchers identified the proteins channelrhodopsin-1 and -2. Nagel showed that channelrhodopsin-2 reacts to light within 0.2 milliseconds and can also make human cells sensitive to light.