Gero Miesenböck invented the breakthrough concept of optogenetics. He was the first to program neurons genetically to express a photoreceptor, allowing him to regulate the cells’ electrical activity with light. By restricting the photoreceptor to distinct neurons in the brain, he was able to remote-control specific behaviours, such as different forms of movement or the courtship display of male flies. Optogenetics is now used worldwide in fundamental biological research and holds promise for the development of new therapeutic approaches to brain disorders. Gero Miesenböck’s current work centres on the neural control and biological function of sleep. His discovery of machinery that gears the activity of sleep-control neurons to the fate of electrons in the respiratory chain suggests that sleep helps to tame the dangers of aerobic metabolism.
Academic Career
Gero Miesenböck studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck in his native Austria. After completing his MD, he moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, USA, for postdoctoral research. He was on the faculty of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Yale University before being appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford in 2007. Since 2011, he has also served as the founding director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. Miesenböck has received numerous awards for the invention of optogenetics, including the Brain Prize, the Heinrich Wieland Prize, the Massry Prize, the Shaw Prize, and the Japan Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an elected member of EMBO, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the Academia Europaea.
