Comment by hypendev
12 hours ago
Congratulations to the winners!
From my understanding, this discovery is on the level of what transistors were for electronics - unlocking a completely new way to understand and design the electronic circuits, which later on enabled the rise of computing.
Since compared to biology our computing is still highly primitive, it seems like next step in compute power will be biological and quantum computing.
It could be in the future but its not yet. Optogenetics has just merely been one more albeit powerful tool in the neuroscience toolkit and have generally not been impressed with how useful (or not) it has been..
I think its hard to measure the impact directly, but I'd say it has an enormous indirect effect on neuroscience that is bigger than anything yet I think.
You have to imagine, before opto, EVERYTHING in neuroscience was either genetic or observational, nothing really good with manipulating circuit function directly except for the only real intervention we had - ablation of an entire region without any specificity, especially with regards to passing axons.
Now, I literally expect any neuro paper that even touches behavior or circuits to have some sort of validation with opto, or it's harder for me to believe.
Maybe there's a bit of an over reliance on it in my above comment, but if you have a better causal tool to suggest, be my guest.