Georg Nagel gave the first few biology lectures I had at uni. People were already saying that he was due for the Nobel Prize - I'm happy for him the committee now came to the same conclusion!
The lectures themselves were, unfortunately, quite boring. This was the introductory course for freshmen, covering a lot of material that students ought to have learnt in school already. Much of the time, the professor appeared to be as bored by it as many of the students were, but I guess it had to be done and someone had to do it...
Beyond the initial discovery, Karl and his lab put an extraordinary amount of effort into making the technique accessible and available for neuroscientists around the world. The impact on the field here is in the distillation, in ensuring it could be applied to manifold questions and disease models. Richly deserved.
I participated in early work in optogenetics in larger brains, and Karl was my postdoc adviser. He is a deeply thoughtful and generous scientist. His book Projections unpacks some of his thinking as to how these tools may unravel and treat a panel of psychiatric conditions.
I know that there are some works regarding the feasibility of this technique for optical cochlear implants. How is this going on? Last time I spoke with one of the large CI vendors they were rather sceptical
It's a rule in the Nobel Foundation's statutes added in 1968, a provision that no more than three persons may share a Nobel prize. In practice no science prize had gone to more than three people before that either. In medicine it usually means one or two key contributors get left out, as with Boyden and Bamberg this year.
How is this done in living brains? Presumably you have to vivisect sufficiently be able to shine light on neurons, or have some sort of probe that does it. At that point how is it easier than electrically stimulating the nerves to generate action potentials?
(To be clear, since it's probably necessary, I'm asking a curiosity-driven question about the mechanism here, not throwing shade on the work. Given it's won the researchers a Nobel prize it's obviously highly significant.)
Yes you put in a "probe" (fiber optic), just like when you stimulate with an electrode. The difference is electricity stimulates everything, while the light can be targeted, not by what it illuminates but what responds* because...
Ahead of time, you either use viral tools or other genetic modifications to make specific cell types express the photorecrptor.
*there is an effect of light/heat that all cells are subject to, and good experiments try to control for this as best they can
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16116447/ Ed Boyden and Feng Zhang were first and second author, respectively. A real all-star team. Too bad only the PI is awarded (not to say Deisseroth doesn't deserve it, he definitely does)
From my understanding, this discovery is on the level of what transistors were for electronics - unlocking a completely new way to understand and design the electronic circuits, which later on enabled the rise of computing.
Since compared to biology our computing is still highly primitive, it seems like next step in compute power will be biological and quantum computing.
It could be in the future but its not yet. Optogenetics has just merely been one more albeit powerful tool in the neuroscience toolkit and have generally not been impressed with how useful (or not) it has been..
The lectures themselves were, unfortunately, quite boring. This was the introductory course for freshmen, covering a lot of material that students ought to have learnt in school already. Much of the time, the professor appeared to be as bored by it as many of the students were, but I guess it had to be done and someone had to do it...
I participated in early work in optogenetics in larger brains, and Karl was my postdoc adviser. He is a deeply thoughtful and generous scientist. His book Projections unpacks some of his thinking as to how these tools may unravel and treat a panel of psychiatric conditions.
(To be clear, since it's probably necessary, I'm asking a curiosity-driven question about the mechanism here, not throwing shade on the work. Given it's won the researchers a Nobel prize it's obviously highly significant.)
Ahead of time, you either use viral tools or other genetic modifications to make specific cell types express the photorecrptor.
*there is an effect of light/heat that all cells are subject to, and good experiments try to control for this as best they can
Also, just like with CRISPR, there were others thinking along the same lines at the same time, but who didn't get the high profile publications: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/he-may-have-inven...
From my understanding, this discovery is on the level of what transistors were for electronics - unlocking a completely new way to understand and design the electronic circuits, which later on enabled the rise of computing.
Since compared to biology our computing is still highly primitive, it seems like next step in compute power will be biological and quantum computing.