A life in context
The person behind the prize
Deisseroth trained in neuroscience and medicine at Stanford, earning a PhD in 1998 and an MD in 2000. He opened his Stanford laboratory in 2004. His clinical and research interests connect psychiatric conditions with the operation of brain circuits.
The contribution
His team helped turn microbial light-sensitive proteins into tools for controlling selected neurons. Experiments could then test what a circuit does, rather than only observe its activity.
The idea in plain language
Knowing which neurons are active is different from knowing what they cause. Optogenetics lets researchers change the activity of selected cells and observe what follows.
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