PROFILES IN THE NEWS
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Date: Friday, October 9, 1981
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
Harvard Medical School professors David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel,
who won the Nobel Prize for medicine today, have worked together since 1959 to
find out how the brain sees.
They share the award, the first to be announced in this year's Nobel
series, with Dr. Robert Sperry of California Institute of Technology, a
Harvard alumnus and a native of Hartford.
Wiesel, a former member of the Nobel awards committee, and Hubel both won
the award for discoveries concerning "information processing in the visual
system."
Wiesel said today he would like to think that the research has helped
doctors understand the importance of early treatment for children with visual
problems.
Wiesel was concerned about the publicity that will come with the prize.
"Maybe I should go and hide," he said.
Dr. Sperry received half the prize, worth $180,000 this year, for
discoveries about "the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres."
Sperry has "brilliantly succeeded in extracting the secrets from both
hemispheres of the brain," the awards committee said, "and in demonstrating
that they are highly specialized, and also that many higher functions are
centered in the right hemisphere."
Doctors Hubel and Wiesel, professors of neurobiology, have pioneered
research in brain circuitry and the neurochemistry of vision.
Just 10 years ago they shared a $25,000 award from Research to Prevent
Blindness, Inc., a national organization that promotes research on vision
problems.
Hubel and Wiesel traced the path of light entering the eye to specific
cells in the brain and found that sight is controlled by a group of complex
master cells.
These cells, the two scientists discovered, are fed bits of information by
simple cells that describe the shape or color of objects. The master cells
form a unified image from this information.
Hubel and Wiesel became partners in research when they came to Harvard
Medical School in 1959. They moved up the ladder together at Harvard and won
their professorships at nearly the same time.
Hubel was born in Windsor, Ont., in 1926 and graduated from McGill Medical
School. Wiesel, born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1924, received his medical degree
in Stockholm. He taught at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore before coming to
Harvard.
This is the eighth consecutive year that Americans have won a share of the
Nobel Prize for medicine.
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