A light-activated opsin derived from algae on the surface membrane of a mouse neuron. Credit Charu Ramakrishnan, Priya Rajasethupathy, and Karl Deisseroth
He is a Stanford psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and one of the people most responsible for the development of optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to turn brain cells on and off with a combination of genetic manipulation and pulses of light.
He is also one of the developers of a new way to turn brains transparent, though he was away when some new twists on the technique were presented by his lab a day or two earlier.
“Optogenetics is the most revolutionary thing that has happened in neuroscience in the past couple of decades,” she said. “It is one of the advances that made it seem this is the right time to do a brain initiative.”
Optogenetics is a crucial tool in understanding function. Clarity, on the other hand, is an aid to anatomical studies, basic mapping of structure, which, he says, is as important to understand as activity.
