On 5 October, the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for the discoveries behind optogenetics, a field that lets scientists use light to switch specific neurons on and off. I read about their contributions, and something else caught my attention. The three made very different contributions to the same breakthrough. That made me think about a role we rarely talk about in organisations: the translator. Not the translator of languages. The translator of ideas. Three different contributions Hegemann was studying how a single-celled alga senses and moves toward light, which … Continue reading The Translator: The Person Who Sees What an Idea Could Become