Rules and Limits of Nobel Prizes Leave Out Key Scientific Contributors

UPDATE - follow-up to The people this year's Nobel Prizes left out: Strict prize rules and a focus on singular breakthroughs over lifetime achievements routinely exclude major contributors to award-winning scientific discoveries.

Physiology or Medicine

The 2026 physiology or medicine prize went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for optogenetics. However, Gero Miesenböck first sensitized neurons to light in 2002. Hegemann and Nagel identified the protein channelrhodopsin-2, but Edward Boyden was the first author on the paper that applied it to control neurons. Feng Zhang and Xue Han also made vital contributions by adapting halorhodopsin to silence neurons with light.

Physics

Francis Halzen won the physics prize alone for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, despite the project involving roughly 450 experts across 58 institutions in 14 countries. John G. Learned co-reported the core idea with Halzen in 1988. Furthermore, IceCube data credited Aya Ishihara with finding key high-energy neutrino events, and Claudio Kopper, Naoko Kurahashi, and Nathan Whitehorn were corresponding authors on the 2013 paper reporting them.

Chemistry

Frederick Charles Frank proposed a mathematical model for chemical imbalance in 1953, but died in 1998 before he could be honored. Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai provided experimental evidence for the model. Takanori Shibata authored a 1999 paper extending this work, while Donna Blackmond extended Kagan's mathematics and helped explain the Soai reaction, yet neither shared this year's chemistry prize.

Context

Scientific discovery relies on collaborative efforts, incremental advances, and large support networks spanning many years. The Nobel Foundation limits each prize to a maximum of three living people, meaning many key contributors to major breakthroughs are inevitably left out.