Science Senator congratulates Nobel Prize winner Peter Hegemann

Science Senator Ina Czyborra congratulated researcher Peter Hegemann from the Humboldt University in Berlin on winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine. “This is an outstanding award and recognizes an impressive scientific achievement that has fundamentally changed our understanding of the brain,” said Czyborra (SPD).

Hegemann will receive this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine together with Georg Nagel from Würzburg and the US researcher Karl Deisseroth. The award is for her discoveries in the area of ​​light-controlled ion channels and optogenetics. The researchers each receive a third of the prize money, equivalent to around one million euros.

Decades of research history

The award is also an acknowledgment of Hegemann's decades of research history, according to the Senate Department for Science. «Peter Hegemann has created essential foundations for optogenetics with his work on light-sensitive proteins from microalgae. His research showed how biological processes can be controlled by light.”

Together with the work of Nagel and Deisseroth, a technology was created that is now used worldwide to study neuronal circuits and better understand the mechanisms of the brain and diseases, according to the science administration.

Berlin is “proud of its new Nobel Prize winner”

This Nobel Prize is a cause for great joy for Berlin as a science location and Berlin is proud of its new Nobel Prize winner, Czyborra continued. The Nobel Prize makes the international appeal of optobiology research at Humboldt University visible and shows the value of persistent basic research for medicine.

Hegemann himself did not appear in public that morning. He didn't show up at his research institute, the Institute of Biology at HU Berlin.