이 작은 독립출판사가 노벨문학상 수상자 14명을 보유하고 있다니 경이롭다. 작가들이 유명해진 후에도 꾸준히 여기서 책을 낸다고.
편집자의 안목 덕분이기도 하겠지만, 결론은 오직 하나. 편집자의 끈질긴 애정과 관심이라고 한다. (완전 공감.)
https://t.co/Pas7k1ML1E
Curiosity often sparks scientific breakthroughs. For 2026 medicine laureate Peter Hegemann, it began with a question: how could a tiny green alga called Chlamydomonas react so rapidly to light?
The Chlamydomonas algae is famous for its ability to swim towards light. When the alga is stirred into a petri dish, the liquid turns a faint green colour. If one side of the dish is illuminated, the green colour moves towards the light source, as the microscopic algae swim towards it. The algae sense the light with an eyespot, a dot on the cell’s surface that contains a light-capturing molecule, retinal.
Hegemann discovered electrical signals in the light-sensitive eyespot that occurred just half a millisecond after illumination, far faster than the response of the human eye. He could only think of one explanation for this ultrafast response: the process must be much simpler than in a human eye. He proposed that a single protein could both detect light and act as an ion channel, an idea initially met with scepticism.
After years of experiments with his colleague Georg Nagel, Hegemann's hypothesis proved to be correct. Together, they discovered proteins that functioned exactly as he had predicted: ion channels that opened in response to light. This breakthrough laid the foundation for optogenetics, a revolutionary technique that allows scientists to control individual nerve cells with light. What began as a question about a microscopic alga ultimately helped transform the field of neuroscience.
Read more about the newly awarded 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: https://t.co/UkNVNYb0xU
1. CRISPR came from basic research on bacteria.
2. Optogenetics started with a discovery in algae.
3. The GFP protein comes from jellyfish.
The biggest breakthroughs all trace to scientists follow their curiosity. This is one huge reason why we must keep funding basic research!