Why This Year's Nobel Prizes Left Out Deserving Scientists

The 2026 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for their work on optogenetics, leaving out several key researchers who made the breakthrough possible. Alfred Nobel's will placed no limit on the number of winners, but Nobel Foundation statutes cap each prize at three living people. Gero Miessenböck and co-workers first sensitised non-light-sensitive neurons to light in 2002. Hegemann and Nagel later identified the protein channelrhodopsin-2, while Edward Boyden helped pioneer its application in neuroscience as the first author of the paper showing it could control neurons. Feng Zhang and Boyden separately adapted halorhodopsin to silence neurons with light.

Physics Prize Limits

The 2026 physics prize was awarded solely to Francis Halzen for contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and high-energy neutrino discoveries. However, IceCube is an international collaboration of around 450 experts across 58 institutions in 14 countries. Although foundation statutes allow prizes to go to organisations, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did not use this option. In 1988, Halzen and John G. Learned proposed using Antarctic ice as a neutrino target. While IceCube data eventually proved space neutrinos could be energised by natural phenomena, the collaboration credited Aya Ishihara with finding the first two candidate events in 2012, and a 2013 Science paper named Claudio Kopper, Naoko Kurahashi, and Nathan Whitehorn as corresponding authors.

Chemistry Prize Gaps

The chemistry prize highlighted rules excluding deceased individuals, passing over British physicist Frederick Charles Frank, who in 1953 modeled how chemical imbalances become the norm. Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai provided experimental evidence between 1986 and 1995, but Frank died in 1987 at age 87. The 1995 paper by Soai included second author Takanori Shibata, who later extended the work in a 1999 paper. The committee also excluded U.S. chemical engineer Donna Blackmond, despite her work extending mathematical understandings of non-linear effects and explaining the Soai reaction.

Context

Nobel Prizes rely on strict institutional rules that limit awards to a maximum of three living individuals per category, which often excludes large scientific teams and collaborative contributors. Modern scientific research typically depends on massive global teamwork involving hundreds of researchers, engineers, and students rather than isolated discoveries by single individuals. Recognising individual breakthroughs remains a tradition of the prize committee, even as science itself advances through cumulative, shared effort.