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To understand how the brain forms memories, feelings and behaviours has long been a dream for researchers. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain. This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries.

In September 1928 Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to a curious sight. He saw that bacteria he had been growing on a culture plate had been killed in an area close to where a mould was accidentally growing. It was to be a monumental discovery – Alexander Fleming had just discovered penicillin. He isolated the mould and showed that it released a substance that inhibited bacterial growth. He named the substance penicillin after the name of the mould. Fleming reported his ground-breaking results in the scientific paper 'On the antibacterial action of cultures of a Penicillium with special reference to their use in the isolation of B. influenzae', published in British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. More about Fleming: bit.ly/2XuCctW