DOMINANT ANGLE
Islamabad takes note of the therapeutic promise of optogenetics from this Nobel, presented by the Pakistani press as a lead against dementia, depression, and blindness.
Dominant angle identified — does not reflect unanimity of this country’s media
KEY POINTS
- 01
The 2026 physiology or medicine prize goes to Karl Deisseroth (54 years old), Peter Hegemann (71 years old), and Georg Nagel (73 years old), who share 12 million Swedish crowns (1.2 million dollars).
- 02
According to Thomas Perlmann, the method allows for turning on or off the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain.
- 03
According to AFP as reported by ARY News, optogenetics could lead to breakthroughs against dementia, depression, and blindness.
ANALYSIS
Islamabad, October 6, 2026. Business Recorder, ARY News, and Geo News are covering the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded on Monday, October 5, to American Karl Deisseroth and Germans Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for their "discoveries concerning light-activated ion channels and optogenetics".
Business Recorder, from Stockholm, quotes Thomas Perlmann, Secretary General of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute: the method "allows for the activation or deactivation of individual nerve cell activity in a living brain" and is now used "in laboratories around the world". Anna Wedell, a committee member, sees this as the beginning of a "new era" for neuroscience, while specifying that it is only a start. The three laureates share 12 million Swedish crowns, equivalent to $1.2 million. The newspaper recalls the origin of the work: in the early 1990s, Hegemann studied the reaction of the alga Chlamydomonas to light, then Nagel identified channelrhodopsin-2 by injecting alga genes into frog oocytes.
ARY News publishes an AFP dispatch dated October 6, which emphasizes the applications: optogenetics could lead to advances against dementia, depression, and blindness. Simon Schultz, a professor at Imperial College London, believes that manipulating cells with light and genetics has been "transformative" for biological sciences. His team has used it as a closed-loop treatment for memory disorders, and the next step would be to improve learning and memory in complex tasks. The text also mentions blindness, with Jose-Alain Sahel.
Geo News dedicates a portrait to the three laureates. Deisseroth, 54, a professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at Stanford, is a trained psychiatrist: he turned to this field after meeting patients with depression and autism. He named the field "optogenetics" in 2006. Hegemann, born in 1954 in Münster, teaches experimental biophysics at Humboldt University in Berlin. Nagel, 73, is a biophysicist and teaches neurophysiology.
The Pakistani coverage thus remains that of an international scientific event, relayed by dispatches and portraits. It highlights the potential patients and the researchers' careers, and none of the three articles links the prize to research or public health in Pakistan. The announcements of the prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economics will follow in the coming days.
