I've seen a ton of posts about a fourth person who also deserved this Nobel, Ed Boyden, but not much about Zhuo-Hua Pan. The history below and the article about Pan are wild. A small lab, a vision-only framing, and two paper rejections are most of the reason his name isn't in the citation history. Feb 2004: Zhuo-Hua Pan, at Wayne State, has the protein ChR2 firing cultured retinal ganglion cells. (His account.) Jul 2004: Pan uses a virus to deliver ChR2 into living rat retinas; five weeks later he records light-evoked responses in vivo. (His account.) Aug 2004: Ed Boyden, working with Deisseroth at Stanford, gets light-driven spikes in cultured hippocampal neurons. Nov 2004: Pan submits to Nature, whose editors send him to Nature Neuroscience, which rejects it. The Journal of Neuroscience rejects it next. May 2005: Pan presents at the ARVO meeting. That 15-minute talk and its abstract are the first public record: ChR2 in rat retinal neurons in vivo, light-evoked depolarization. Aug 2005: Boyden, Zhang, Bamberg, Nagel and Deisseroth publish in Nature Neuroscience, framed as a general tool. (The editor later told Pan that framing, not the biology, was the difference. His paper read as a vision-restoration finding, theirs as a technology.) Pan's own paper lands in Neuron in April 2006, by which point three other groups had published on ChR2 in neurons. The patent office treated Pan’s May 2005 abstract as prior art and rejected a Stanford patent more than once. It didn't issue until March 2016, after Boyden and Deisseroth signed a declaration that they had conceived the method in the lab before that abstract. "Boyden, who is now a professor at MIT, was surprised when told by STAT that Pan ran the experiment first. "Wow. Interesting. I didn't know that," Boyden said." How much of this is the rejections and how much is that Deisseroth and Boyden saw the general tool while Pan was aiming at blindness? Probably both. But it's a reminder that what counts as inventing something in science is mostly a question of who publishes, and publishing is not a neutral process. scientificamerican.com/artic…