Director's Message | Fall 2026

Every October, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine offers a window onto what the scientific community values most. This year's prize, awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for the discovery of light-gated ion channels and the development of optogenetics, is at its heart a prize for a tool. Its origins could hardly have been more unlikely. Hegemann and Nagel were studying how a single-celled green alga swims toward light and found that it senses light through a channel protein that opens when illuminated. In Deisseroth's hands, that algal protein became a way to switch specific neurons on and off with a flash of blue light. Neuroscience has not been the same since.

There is a pleasing symmetry here. In 1906, the Nobel Prize went to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose stains and microscopes let us see neurons for the first time; 120 years later, the prize honors a way to control them. Stem cell biology has followed a similar arc, advancing at the pace of its instruments. When Leonard Herzenberg and colleagues at Stanford built the fluorescence-activated cell sorter, they laid the groundwork for stem cell laboratories around the world to turn “stem cells” from an inferred concept into cell populations one could isolate, analyze, and transplant. Nearly every stem cell population studied since, including the muscle stem cells my own lab works on, has been defined by what a cell sorter can detect and what a microscope can reveal.

At the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center, the expertise for these technologies resides in two places: the Microscopy Core and the Flow Cytometry Core. The instruments they house, from confocal and light-sheet microscopes to high-parameter cell sorters, are too expensive and evolve too quickly for any single laboratory to own and maintain. Shared, they put leading-edge technology in the hands of every member of our Center, from undergraduate researchers to senior faculty. Just as important are the core scientists who run them, who train our students, help design experiments, and solve the problems no manual anticipates. Recently, the cores supported the Chongyuan Luo lab in mapping how key brain cells develop and the Lili Yang lab in developing off-the-shelf CAR-NKT cell therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Shared infrastructure rarely makes headlines; no one wins a prize for keeping a cell sorter calibrated. Yet this year's Nobel is a reminder that tools can themselves be the breakthrough and that the next one may come from a direction no one expects. At a time of uncertainty in federal research funding, investing in these resources is among the most effective ways to stretch every dollar and keep our science at the frontier. I am grateful to the core staff, faculty, and supporters who make that possible. The alga that swam toward light had no idea it was about to transform neuroscience. Our job is to be ready when the next unexpected tool arrives.

Thomas Rando, MD, PhD
Director, UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center
Professor of Neurology and Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology