Why this year's Nobel Prizes left out many key scientists behind major discoveries

The 2026 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for their work on optogenetics, but the field was built on contributions from several other scientists who were left out. In 2002, Austrian scientist Gero Miessenböck and his team first sensitised non-light-sensitive neurons to light, and his Oxford profile describes him as an inventor of optogenetics. Hegemann and Nagel identified the protein channelrhodopsin-2, but Edward Boyden was the first author of the paper that proved it could control neurons and is now a professor at MIT and the Broad Institute. Another MIT researcher, Feng Zhang, helped adapt halorhodopsin to silence neurons with light in 2007 alongside Xue Han and Boyden.

Physics Prize

The physics prize was awarded solely to Francis Halzen for his work on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and high-energy neutrinos, despite IceCube being an international collaboration of roughly 450 experts across 58 institutions in 14 countries. The Nobel Foundation statutes allow prizes to go to organisations, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did not use this option. Halzen and John G. Learned first proposed using Antarctica's ice mass in 1988. In 2012, IceCube data revealed neutrinos energised by space phenomena. While the citation credits Halzen alone, the collaboration credited Japanese physicist Aya Ishihara with finding the two key candidate events, earning her a 2013 IUPAP award. Furthermore, a 2013 Science paper on the discovery named Claudio Kopper, Naoko Kurahashi, and Nathan Whitehorn as corresponding authors.

Chemistry Prize

The chemistry prize highlighted rules excluding deceased researchers, as British physicist Frederick Charles Frank conceived a mathematical model in 1953 for chemical imbalance, but died in 1998 at age 87. Between 1986 and 1995, Henri Kagan in France and Kenso Soai in Japan provided experimental evidence for Frank's model. However, Soai's 1995 paper included Takanori Shibata, who later authored a 1999 paper extending the work to demonstrate the exact reaction Frank modeled, yet Shibata was excluded from this year's prize. The committee also excluded U.S. chemical engineer Donna Blackmond, whose technical statement credited her with extending Kagan's work and explaining the mechanism of the Soai reaction.

Context

Nobel Prize rules cap individual awards at a maximum of three living people per category, which frequently omits large teams and foundational contributors from major scientific achievements. Scientific breakthroughs rely on cumulative work across decades, including students, technicians, and international collaborators whose contributions cannot all fit within strict award limits.