Six eminent scientists share the world’s largest brain research prize

Karl Deisseroth among the prize winners

March 11, 2013

The Brain Prize – Denmark’s 1 million euro brain research prize – is awarded to six leading scientists for the development of ‘optogenetics’, a revolutionary technique that advances our understanding of the brain and its disorders.

The names of the prize winners, Austrian Gero Miesenböck, Germans Ernst Bamberg, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, and Americans Ed Boyden and Karl Deisseroth, were announced on Monday 11 March 2013 in Copenhagen.

Together these scientists laid the foundations for a revolutionary technique – optogenetics – which will provide us with entirely new, fundamental knowledge of the complicated functions of the brain.

Optogenetics makes it easier to investigate diseases of the brain such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, pain disorders, schizophrenia, ADHD and addiction. It will play a significant role in the understanding of these disorders and, over time, in the development of a treatment for them.

Read the press release at the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation »

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