DOMINANT ANGLE
Pretoria takes away from this Nobel a chain of fundamental research, from the Chlamydomonas algae to laboratories around the world, and puts a price on the award in rands.
Dominant angle identified — does not reflect unanimity of this country’s media
KEY POINTS
- 01
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Karl Deisseroth (54 years old), Peter Hegemann (71 years old), and Georg Nagel (73 years old) for optogenetics.
- 02
The winners share 12 million Swedish crowns, according to TimesLIVE and Business Day.
- 03
Nagel discovered channelrhodopsin-2; in 2003 they showed it could be introduced into human and hamster cells, and the term optogenetics dates back to 2006.
ANALYSIS
Pretoria, October 6, 2026. TimesLIVE and Business Day published the same story on Monday, October 5: American Karl Deisseroth and Germans Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for optogenetics, "a technique that uses light to control individual nerve cells in the brain".
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute selected them for their "discoveries concerning light-activated ion channels and optogenetics". Deisseroth is 54 years old, Hegemann 71 years old, and Nagel 73 years old. The two articles specify that the three laureates share 12 million Swedish crowns, converted for local readers to "R20m", twenty million rands.
The story emphasizes scientific progress. In the early 1990s, Hegemann studied the reaction of the alga chlamydomonas to light, "in half a millisecond", and hypothesized that a single protein captures light and acts as an ion channel. Nagel tested this idea by injecting chlamydomonas genes into frog eggs and discovered channelrhodopsine-2, a light-sensitive ion channel. In 2003, they published that this protein can be introduced into human and hamster cells to produce electrical impulses through light.
At Stanford, Deisseroth demonstrated the technique on rat neurons two years later, and the method was named optogenetics in 2006. The articles also cite its use to control the movements of a mouse's whiskers by activating neurons in the motor cortex.
The retained voice is that of Thomas Perlmann, Secretary General of the Nobel Assembly: the method allows for "turning on or off the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain" and is used today in laboratories around the world "to reveal the mysteries of the brain". He reports that the three laureates said they were "surprised and delighted" and happy to receive the prize together, calling each other friends.
The text, as reproduced by the two titles and available in the corpus, does not develop clinical applications or a South African angle: it sticks to the international dispatch and the equivalent in rands of the prize amount.
