When the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced a few days ago, it recognised three scientists whose work may initially sound more like science fiction than something relevant to our everyday lives.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were awarded the prize for discoveries that made optogenetics possible, a technique that allows scientists to control the activity of individual nerve cells using light. It has transformed neuroscience and opened new ways of investigating how the brain works.
For many of us, the word optogenetics is completely foreign. We may struggle to understand how shining light on nerve cells could possibly change medicine or I may even wonder what this has to do with the patients I see in my clinic.
Yet perhaps that is precisely why this Nobel Prize deserves our attention. Some of medicine’s greatest advances began with discoveries that seemed obscure and far removed from the practical day to day business of treating patients.
Optogenetics began, remarkably, with curiosity about a single-celled alga. Researchers Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, both from Germany, investigated how this tiny organism responds to light and identified a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin. Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University subsequently helped turn this discovery into a tool for switching nerve cells on or off with precisely controlled light. Scientists can now investigate the roles of particular brain cells in memory, behaviour and neurological and psychiatric conditions.
Research in this field is also exploring potential clinical applications, including restoring sight in people with visual impairment as well as enhancing the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. The possibilities are exciting, even though optogenetics is not yet a routine treatment for these conditions.
In fact, history provides some remarkable examples of why we should never dismiss research simply because its practical value is not immediately obvious.
Consider this simple drug called insulin. Before its discovery, a diagnosis of diabetes could amount to a death sentence. Patients with severe disease were sometimes placed on starvation diets in an attempt to prolong their lives.
In 1921, Frederick Banting and medical student Charles Best began experiments at the University of Toronto to isolate a substance from the pancreas that could control blood sugar. Their work, supported by John Macleod and several others, led to insulin treatment. One of the earliest patients to receive it was 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, who was dangerously ill. After treatment, his condition improved dramatically. Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in 1923, and today, insulin remains essential to the lives of millions of people with diabetes.
Alexander Fleming provides another wonderful example of how a scientific observation can change the course of medicine. In 1928, he noticed that a mould contaminating one of his laboratory culture plates had prevented bacteria from growing around it. This seemingly small observation led to the discovery of penicillin. Fleming, along with other scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Penicillin ushered in the antibiotic era, transforming the treatment of bacterial infections and making many previously life-threatening infections treatable.
A similar landmark discovery was the double-helix structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick, with crucial contributions from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction work was crucial to understanding DNA’s structure, but she died in 1958 and was not eligible for the Nobel Prize.
At the time, the structure of DNA represented a fundamental scientific breakthrough rather than a treatment that doctors could immediately offer patients. Yet understanding how genetic information is stored and passed on transformed biology and eventually helped support genetic testing, the identification of inherited cancer risks and the development of precision medicine.
Today, when we investigate whether a woman’s ovarian or breast cancer might be linked to an inherited genetic alteration, we are benefiting from decades of research that began with trying to understand the very blueprint of life.
Yet another extraordinary story concerns stomach ulcers. For years, stress, lifestyle and excess stomach acid were widely blamed for peptic ulcer disease. Australian researchers Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was responsible for many cases.
Their findings challenged established medical thinking and initially met resistance. In a striking attempt to demonstrate his theory, Marshall drank a preparation containing the bacterium and developed stomach inflammation. Their research eventually transformed treatment: instead of relying solely on acid-suppressing medication, doctors could eradicate the infection with antibiotics. They received the Nobel Prize in 2005.
As a gynaecological oncologist, I find another example particularly meaningful in my daily practice. In 2008, Harald zur Hausen received the Nobel Prize for discovering the role of human papillomaviruses (HPV) in cervical cancer. His theory challenged the prevailing view of the disease and took years of research to establish. Yet that work helped lay the foundations for HPV vaccines, which now offer a powerful means of preventing cervical cancer. What began as a scientific question about the cause of a malignancy has become a major public-health opportunity to prevent cancer before it even develops.
These stories remind us that progress rarely arrives fully formed. It may begin with an observation in a laboratory, a theory that challenges accepted beliefs or a question that others consider unimportant. It takes curiosity, persistence and rigorous testing to turn such ideas into treatments that benefit patients.
This is also why recognition through the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is so important. Like the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace, it does more than reward individual achievement. It draws the world’s attention to work that might otherwise remain largely within scientific circles, encourages public interest in discovery and acknowledges years of dedication, collaboration and often painstaking research.
In medicine, however, the impact can extend far beyond the laboratory. Nobel recognition can help the world appreciate that behind many of the treatments we now take for granted are scientists who spent years pursuing questions without knowing whether their work would ever benefit a single patient.
So quite like optogenetics today, the next discovery that changes medicine may not initially look like a breakthrough. It may sound strange, highly technical or even irrelevant to our lives.
But, to me, there is something profoundly moving about recognising those who devote their lives to discovering what the rest of us have yet to imagine—because somewhere in their work may lie the answer that has the ability to save a life.
