Nobel Prize awarded for showing how nerve cells shape feelings

JUST IN: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their pioneering work in optogenetics, revealing how nerve cells shape feelings.

They won a Nobel Prize for controlling brain cells with light. Actual light.

The medicine prize goes to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for optogenetics, and here are the three of them. In the early 2000s, Hegemann and Nagel found a protein in algae called channelrhodopsin that responds to light. Deisseroth helped turn that into a tool, so you can switch specific nerve cells on and off like a lamp, and watch what happens to memory, fear, behaviour.

The Nobel committee says it revealed the circuits behind specific feelings, and doctors are already using it to try to restore sight in people with visual impairment. That's the medal they'll share, along with twelve million Swedish kronor, about nine hundred thousand pounds, split three ways.

A pond plant's protein, borrowed by humans, now lighting up the biggest mystery we have, our own heads. Not bad for algae.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.