Word: granits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...vision. Last week Stockholm's Royal Caroline Institute, custodian of the Nobel Prize in medicine, jointly awarded the 1967 prize to three of the most important eye cartographers of the present generation: the U.S.'s George Wald and Haldan Keffer Hartline and Sweden's Ragnar Granit...
Hartline and Granit, by contrast, are primarily electro-physiologists who have made important discoveries regarding the nervous responses of vision. Hartline, 63, a professor at New York's Rockefeller University, has traced the patterns of nerve responses after light touches the retina's receptors. Using horseshoe crabs, which have relatively simple eyes, and frogs, he recorded the electrical signals sent out by a single nerve fiber, learned the neural influences of one receptor cell on another. "We listened in," he explains, "on the small traffic signals in the body of the crab...
Along the same lines, Granit, 67, who was a professor of neurophysiology at the Royal Caroline Institute until last spring and is now a visiting professor at Oxford, uncovered clues to how the eye determines color by demonstrating that nerve fibers in the retina are differently sensitive to lights of different wave lengths. However, for all that is known on "what happens between the outside and the inside" of the eye, says Hartline, the current knowledge of vision is "just a beginning. The next step is to know what happens in the visual centers of the brain." Only a beginning...
Wald, 60, will share the $62,000 Medicine and Physiology prize with Haldan K. Hartline of New York's Rockefeller Institute and Ragnar Granit of Sweden, who have both concentrated on electrical aspects of vision...