Quantum cows - part 1
Oct 11, 2026 · 29 min · 8 segments
Listen to Dr James Bennet talk about how he creates photon pairs to detect greenhouse gases from cows. News of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine. hosted and produced by Ian Woolf…
Oct 11, 2026 · 29 min · 8 segments
Listen to Dr James Bennet talk about how he creates photon pairs to detect greenhouse gases from cows. News of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine. hosted and produced by Ian Woolf…
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for the discovery of our light-gated ion channels and optogenetics to Karl Desseroff from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Stanford University in America, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin in Germany, and George Nagel from the University of Würzburg in Germany.
Essentially, optogenetics is a new technique that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings, and behaviors in the living brain.
Peter Hegemann wondered how Chlamyda demonos, a single-celled algae, is able to swim towards a light source.
When researchers stir Chlamyda demonos algae into a Petri dish, the liquid turns a faint green color.
If they then shine a light on one side of the dish, the green colour moves towards the light source, as the microscopic algae swim towards it.
The algae can sense the light with an eye spot, a tiny orange dot on the cell's surface that contains a light-capturing molecule, retinol.
Using minuscule electrodes, Hegemann measured the electrical signals that arose in Chlamydidomonas when the eye spot was illuminated and found it reacted 20 times faster than the proteins in human eyes.
When he received the two Chlamydidomonas genes, he injected copies of them separately into different batches of frog eggs, which then began to mass produce the two new proteins.
The new proteins ended up on the surface of the egg cells in the surrounding membrane.
Nagel could investigate how they functioned, and he discovered that the hypothesis formulated by Hegemann a decade earlier was correct.
When blue light shines on the alga cell, a channel opens through the channel rhodopsin protein.
They put the channel rhodopsin protein in embryonic human kidney cells and found that those cells became light sensitive.
In 2006, Dezeroth's team introduced the gene for channelrhodopsin-2 into a specific nerve cell type in the motor cortex, the area of the brain that controls
movement.
Then they shone light onto the nerve cells with a thin optic fiber that they fed into the mouse's brain through a small hole in the skull.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for the discovery of our light-gated ion channels and optogenetics to Karl Desseroff from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Stanford University in America, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin in Germany, and George Nagel from the University of Würzburg in Germany.
Essentially, optogenetics is a new technique that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings, and behaviors in the living brain.
Peter Hegemann wondered how Chlamyda demonos, a single-celled algae, is able to swim towards a light source.
When researchers stir Chlamyda demonos algae into a Petri dish, the liquid turns a faint green color.
If they then shine a light on one side of the dish, the green colour moves towards the light source, as the microscopic algae swim towards it.
The algae can sense the light with an eye spot, a tiny orange dot on the cell's surface that contains a light-capturing molecule, retinol.
Using minuscule electrodes, Hegemann measured the electrical signals that arose in Chlamydidomonas when the eye spot was illuminated and found it reacted 20 times faster than the proteins in human eyes.
When he received the two Chlamydidomonas genes, he injected copies of them separately into different batches of frog eggs, which then began to mass produce the two new proteins.
The new proteins ended up on the surface of the egg cells in the surrounding membrane.
Nagel could investigate how they functioned, and he discovered that the hypothesis formulated by Hegemann a decade earlier was correct.
When blue light shines on the alga cell, a channel opens through the channel rhodopsin protein.
They put the channel rhodopsin protein in embryonic human kidney cells and found that those cells became light sensitive.
In 2006, Dezeroth's team introduced the gene for channelrhodopsin-2 into a specific nerve cell type in the motor cortex, the area of the brain that controls
movement.
Then they shone light onto the nerve cells with a thin optic fiber that they fed into the mouse's brain through a small hole in the skull.
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