I'm a night owl, I work late.
I was working on a paper, and I'd gone in to lie down in my bed, and I was just drifting off to sleep when my phone started buzzing on the nightstand.
I just got a phone call this morning that I won the Nobel Prize.
Optogenetics is a way of turning cells on or off with light.
The brain is a jumble of incredibly beautiful, complex, intertwined cells.
So, how does that work?
Anything the brain does, we can turn cells on or off and test ideas, test hypotheses, and see what happens to a survival drive, what happens to hunger or thirst, what happens to aggression, or defensiveness, or parenting, memory?
If you know the cells that matter, you can make medicines that work on those cells.
This is an active area of research.
There are clinical trials, phase 2, moving into phase 3 now, where people are testing medicines for autism and for schizophrenia that were grounded in optogenetic testing.
