California neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth wins Nobel Prize for optogenetics

STANFORD, Calif. — Dr. Karl Deisseroth spent hours fielding congratulatory calls after learning early Monday that he had won a Nobel Prize for medicine for helping to open a new field of brain science called optogenetics. But it wasn't long before the California scientist asked for a break from all the attention for a more ordinary task: He needed to make school lunches for his children, who were asleep in the family home in Stanford, where their father had been speaking in the middle of the night with journalists and well-wishers. Deisseroth, 54, shared this year’s medicine prize with two researchers in Germany for their work in optogenetics, a field that combines light with genes to switch on and off neurons in living brains. A self-described night owl, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and Stanford University professor often works past midnight. After reviewing papers and emailing his students, he said he had just gone to lie down when he got the call from the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm. “I almost felt as if I’d lost the power of forming words,” he told The A

Dr. Karl Deisseroth spent hours fielding congratulatory calls after learning that he had won a Nobel Prize for medicine for helping to open a new field of brain science called optogenetics