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Georg Nagel
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Portrait of Professor Georg Nagel wearing a beige jacket, patterned shirt, and light tie, standing in front of a wooden wall with green plants in the background.
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Portrait of Professor Georg Nagel wearing a beige jacket, patterned shirt, and light tie, standing in front of a wooden wall with green plants in the background.
Georg Nagel, cowinner of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine German biophysicist Georg Nagel made critical contributions to the discovery and understanding of light-sensitive proteins.

Georg Nagel

German biophysicist
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Manjishtha Bhattacharyya
Manjishtha Bhattacharyya is an editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica. She holds a PhD in zoology from Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, and has more than seven years of experience in science communication...
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Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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Georg Nagel (born August 24, 1953, Weingarten, Germany) is a German biophysicist known for his contributions to discoveries relating to light-sensitive proteins. His work helped provide a basis for optogenetics, which combines optics and genetics in technologies designed to control events in cells of living animal tissues. For his discoveries, Nagel was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, shared with American psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth and German biochemist and biophysicist Peter...

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