The call from the Nobel Prize Committee came at 12:27 a.m. Professor Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University did not answer. A few seconds later, the call came through to his wife’s phone.
Deisseroth recalls that the surprise left him unable to speak for about 30 seconds. The first person he told about his victory was his mother, but becoming a Nobel laureate did not change his morning routine — as usual, he got up at dawn and began making sandwiches for his children.
Colleagues describe him as a modest, free-spirited person who often comes to the lab wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Yet behind this simplicity lies an insatiable intellectual passion. That morning, even as journalists’ calls kept coming in at home, he was drinking coffee from a mug that read: “I drink and I know things” — a quote from the TV series Game of Thrones.
Deisseroth is one of the leading figures in modern neuroscience. Since 2004, he has worked on an idea that revolutionized science: optogenetics. Explaining the complex process in language a 10-year-old could understand, as the scientist himself does, he says: “We can use light to turn brain cells on or off. To do this, we use tiny molecules that we obtained from single-celled organisms — algae. It is like understanding a system by ‘shaking it up’ — with optogenetics, we perturb the brain.”
Deisseroth is also a practicing psychiatrist who treats patients with severe, treatment-resistant depression and autism spectrum disorder. Optogenetics has opened entirely new perspectives for understanding the causes of such conditions — including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and anxiety — and for developing new approaches to treatment.
Interestingly, outside science, Deisseroth’s first love was writing and literature. Even as a child, he was fascinated by how words could evoke emotions in the human brain. In 2021, he published Projections: A Story of Human Emotions, in which he draws on his experience working with patients and presents it in literary language. The book has been translated into more than 15 languages.
Asked how he plans to celebrate receiving the Nobel Prize, the scientist behind one of the world’s greatest achievements, who describes the brain as “the most complicated object in the universe,” gives a brief answer: “I’ll get back to work. We still have a lot to discover and a lot of people to help.”
