The Nobel committee has announced this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The winners are Karl Deisseroth of the United States and Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel of Germany, honoured for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.
The winners were announced in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday afternoon Bangladesh time. According to the Nobel committee’s press release, Hegemann and Nagel discovered a protein called channelrhodopsin and found that any cell into which it is introduced becomes sensitive to light.
Deisseroth, meanwhile, inserted the channelrhodopsin gene into mouse nerve cells in the laboratory, and was then able to trigger nerve signals by shining blue light on those cells. He later showed that the light-controlled switch for nerve cells also works in the brains of living mice.
This method of controlling nerve signals with light is now known as optogenetics. Announcing the prize, the Nobel Assembly said optogenetics makes it possible to see how nerve cells in the living brain give rise to memories, feelings and behaviour.
Before this year, 232 people had been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. The youngest was Canada’s Frederick Banting, at 31, and the oldest was Peyton Rous of the United States, at 87.
Last year’s prize went to US scientists Mary E Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi for discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.
The Nobel authorities said at the time that the body’s powerful immune system must be kept in check or it can attack the body’s own organs, and that the three scientists’ discoveries had opened the way to new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Brunkow is a senior programme manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Ramsdell is scientific adviser to Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Sakaguchi is a professor at Osaka University’s Immunology Frontier Research Center in Japan.
The physics prize will be announced on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday, followed by literature on Thursday and peace on Friday. The economics prize will be announced on 12 October.
Each prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a cheque for about $1.2 million. Where a category has more than one winner, the money is shared.
The Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901 to people and organisations that have brought major advances for humanity, in keeping with the wishes of the prize’s founder, the inventor Alfred Nobel.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report