STANFORD, Calif. (AP) — Dr. Karl Deisseroth spent hours fielding congratulatory calls after learning early Monday that he had won a Nobel Prize in medicine for helping pioneer a new field of brain science called optogenetics.
But soon after, the California scientist asked to step away from all the attention for a more mundane task: He had to prepare school lunches for his children, who were sleeping at the family home in Stanford, where their father spoke in the middle of the night with reporters and well-wishers.
Deisseroth, 54 years old, shared this year’s medicine prize with two German researchers for their work in optogenetics, a field that combines light with genes to activate and deactivate neurons in living brains.
A self-described night owl, researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Stanford University, he often works past midnight. After reviewing his homework and sending emails to his students, he said he had just laid down when he received the call from the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm.
“I almost felt like I had lost the power to form words,” he told the Associated Press, “but I recovered after a minute or two.”
He regained his speech quickly enough for remote interviews with AP science journalists. Quick emails to Stanford communications staff put them in touch.
“No real sleep was obtained,” he said an hour after the announcement.
As science journalists chatted with Deisseroth on the phone and on Zoom, an AP photographer and videographer rushed to his home in Stanford.
The photographer arrived around 3:30 a.m. and found Halloween decorations outside the house but only one light on inside. He feared he might have gone to the wrong house before he found the courage to knock on the door.
Dr. Michelle Monje-Deisseroth, the scientist’s wife, answered and drove the photographer to their home, where the Nobel laureate answered calls from his couch.
Monje-Deisseroth, an HHMI researcher and Stanford pediatric neuro-oncologist, was by her side when she wasn’t making coffee for the Stanford communications staff who had joined the celebration. Deisseroth was surprised to learn that his work had been recognized with a Nobel Prize, he told the AP, but not his wife.
Deisseroth recounted the research he conducted with fellow Nobel laureates Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, and its real-world impact.
“For me, I’m a physician-scientist. I’m a psychiatrist. I care about patients and my patients who have autism, who have depression,” he said. “I care about the hope that this brings. But I’m also a fundamentalist scientist, and I care about understanding this amazing organ, the brain, and how it works and how it integrates and calculates and delivers everything that makes us human.”
As Deisseroth finished the interviews, he told the Stanford staff that he needed a one-hour break starting at 6:30 a.m. His children would wake up, he said, and they would need lunches before heading off to school.
When one of the Stanford representatives wondered if the neighbors would take care of all the nighttime commotion, Monje-Deisseroth ignored the question.
They live in university housing, she said. There are a lot of Nobels in the neighborhood.
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Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Associated Press writers Stefanie Dazio in Berlin and Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.
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AP Nobel Prize: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
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