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A new Medium article from our Department explores how optogenetics has transformed neuroscientific research and opened new possibilities for the treatment of brain disorders, and sheds light on the series of early research work undertaken by Professor Gero Miesenböck and his team to evolve this breakthrough technology.

© Gero Miesenböck - in optogenetics, a light beam is used to write information to nerve cells in the brain
Image: Gero Miesenböck

On the afternoon of 12 June 1999, a Saturday, Gero Miesenböck returned to his apartment in Manhattan from a long walk after lunch, ready to open a book he had been absorbed in, Independence Day by Richard Ford. “As I was reaching for the book, drifting from the real world into Ford’s fictional New Jersey, there was the idea of optogenetic control. I knew instantly that I was on to something. My wife remembers my excitement as I tried to explain the concept to her, and especially the terrible hangover nearly two years later when my postdoc and I celebrated that we had got it to work.”

That Manhattan moment launched a series of now classical studies that made Miesenböck the first scientist to modify nerve cells genetically so that their activity could be controlled by light. This breakthrough technology, called optogenetics, has transformed neuroscientific research and opened new possibilities for the treatment of brain disorders. By providing the means to control neural signals with high precision, optogenetics has raised neurobiology’s standards of proof. It has shed light, literally and figuratively, on virtually every brain function: sensation and movement, motivation and learning, sleep and waking, communication and decision-making.

Read more (Medium website)