Word: visional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sense organs, the eye - immensely complicated as it is-is probably the best understood. Since the German biologist Franz Boll discovered that a chemical change takes place when light enters the eye, scientists have worked out a fairly complete map of the mechanics of 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...
...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 it may be, but a remarkably sophisticated beginning...
...deaf? R.: Am I dead? G.: Yes or no? R.: Is there a choice? G.: Is there a God? R.: Foul! No non sequiturs, three-two, one game all. The game at Elsinore is more ominous. Seen through Hamlet's eyes, which is the angle of vision Shakespeare has imposed on Hamlet, the play has a purpose. But seen through the eyes of R. and G., Elsinore is a maze of cross-purposes and Hamlet is a Mad Hatter. They smell the death and disaster around them and wistfully hope to escape, but where to? The court of Denmark...
...Baird's vision of his own dramatic plight is strong: he sees himself romantically as a man of high dsetiny. "Six million people are watching Bill Baird as he's fed to the lions . . . I could do so much for this country . . . Twenty years from now the American people will thank...