Boston-born Harvard graduate Karl Deisseroth has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering optogenetics, a revolutionary technology that allows scientists to control individual nerve cells with light.

For 35 years, the Ig Nobel Prizes made Boston and Cambridge laugh at wonderfully strange science—and then think. This year, the ceremony is leaving the United States for the first time, and the reason says something troubling about America.