The Prize: An Interview with David H. Hubel Nobel Laureate Physiology or Medicine 1981

NormalScintillating scotomaDavid H. Hubel is the John Enders University Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Born in Canada of American parents, he grew up in Montreal, graduated from McGill Medical School, and received training in neurology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Johns Hopkins Hospital. He began research in vision at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and then returned to Johns Hopkins in the laboratory of Stephen Kuffler, where he began a collaboration with Torsten Wiesel that was to last over twenty years and which led, in 1981, to their receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. I invited Dr. Hubel to the Unit for Neurovisual Disorders, Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital to record an audio clip superimposed on a video tape recorded by Hubel in his laboratory during an experiment on a cat. The video shows a sequence of examples of the intracellular recordings going from one cell type to another in the lateral genicular body of the cat and then in various types of neurons in the primary visual cortex.EYE, BRAIN AND VISION David H. Hubel When we look out at the world, more than 100 million receptors in the retina are bombarded by photons of light. These receptors - rods and cones - translate light energy into electrical signals that are carried back through the retina to the brain. How does the brain make sense of these signals? How do we process this staggering influx of information into a coherent image rich in form, color, depth and movement? For thirty years, David H. Hubel has been close to the center of research into these questions. By intricate study of the physiology of the brain down to the level of single cells, he and his colleagues have learned how visual information is reorganized and analyzed, in stage after stage of increasing complexity. In this book we learn how scientists are constructing a wiring diagram of the visual path; we discover what is known about the structure and function of each stage in the pathway, from the light receptors in the retina, through the peanut-size clusters of cells known as the lateral geniculate bodies, to the striate cortex - the first of many higher areas devoted to vision and the part of the brain that is now best understood. We are also introduced to the remarkable geometric patterns that result from the surprising tendency of cells with related functions to be organized in sheets, columns, blobs, and stripes. Dr. Hubel examines the mechanisms by which we perceive color, depth, and movement, and the function of the fibers connecting the two halves of the brain. He describes how the visual circuits develop before birth, and discusses the unexpected consequences of visual deprivation early in life. He brings us to the edge of current knowledge with glimpses of higher visual areas known as areas 18, V4, and MT. And he explores the tasks scientists face in deciphering the many remaining mysteries of vision and of the workings of the human brain. From the back flap of the dust jacket published in 1988 Scientific American Library, a division of HPHLP, New Yorkcurriculum_fello