2026 Nobel Prize winners announced

It’s that time of year again — the first of the 2026 Nobel Prizes have been announced.

Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has decided to award the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for their discoveries concerning optogenetics — a method that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the living brain.

In the early 2000s, Hegemann and Nagel discovered a remarkable protein, channelrhodopsin, in a single-celled alga. When it is illuminated by blue light, a channel opens through the protein and charged ions flow into the cell, creating an electrical impulse. Deisseroth introduced the gene for channelrhodopsin into nerve cells from rats, successfully triggered a nerve signal by illuminating the cells with blue light, and later made this switch for nerve cells work in the brains of living mice. This method for controlling nerve signals with light is now called optogenetics, and it has enabled researchers to reveal neural circuits governing specific memories, feelings and behaviours relevant for neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Physics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics to Francis Halzen, for the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that pass all the way through the Earth and through our bodies without us noticing, but they can be observed under the right conditions.

Halzen first presented his vision for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988, noting that when a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus, it produces a flash of light that can be tracked by sensors in the clear glacial ice. Cosmic neutrinos with extremely high energies are particularly rare, so an enormous volume of ice is needed to observe an adequate number of collisions. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory — a cubic kilometre of ice that is equipped with light sensors — has enabled researchers to discover the first high-energy neutrinos, as well as neutrinos that must originate far outside our solar system — with more discoveries still to be made.

Chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri B Kagan and Kenso Soai, for providing a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously.

Like hands or feet, all amino acids exist as two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in the proteins in your cells. For a long time, chemists strived to produce only one of these mirror images, because in the development of molecules that will interact with living beings — such as in pharmaceuticals — only one mirror image will have the desired effect. In 1986, Kagan discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, which allowed him to create a greater excess of one of the mirror images than had previously been thought possible. Soai took the next step, designing the first ever chemical reaction that had the potential to be homochiral. In 2003, he finally succeeded, presenting a reaction in which only one of the two possible mirror images was formed — the first person ever to achieve this.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is being awarded to Canadian author Anne Carson, while the Nobel Prizes for Peace and Economic Sciences will be announced in the coming days. As per tradition, the main Nobel Prize award ceremony will take place in Stockholm on 10 December — the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

Image caption: The 2025 Nobel Prize award ceremony. Image ©Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Clément Morin.