Word: walde
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Together with George Wald Hopkins has taught Natural Sciences 5 since 1960. According to former students, Hopkins lectures on genetics and embryology have helped make the course one of the most popular in the University...
...Said to Albert." A perennial debate among professors is whether subject or student comes first?and the verdict usually favors those who stress the subject. Harvard Biologist George Wald, 59, shows why. As a researcher, he has made one of the most enlightening finds of recent decades: his discovery of the Vitamin A molecule in the retina goes a long way toward explaining the physiology of eyesight. Light, it seems, makes this crooked molecule straighten out and signal the optic nerve. The very originality of such work also makes Wald a frontiers-of-research lecturer...
...hour. He begins in a whisper to force silence, raises his voice to make a point, then stares "with a kind of eye that burns right through you," as one auditor puts it, while the point sinks home. With crystal clarity and obvious joy at a neat explanation, Wald carries his students from protons in the fall to living organisms in the spring, ends most lectures with some philosophical peroration on the wonder...
...tries, Wald says, to make it "a happy course." Notorious for name-dropping, he tosses in references to "and then I said to Einstein, 'But Albert . . .' "?and his audience, as on cue, hisses in chorus. Wald pretends to ignore this, actually loves it. "He isn't really teaching," says Freshman Tom Zanna. "He's inspiring." Radcliffe English Major Valerie Rough says she is "spiritually majoring in biology" because Wald makes it "so esthetically appealing." Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences Franklin Ford says Wald generates an "amazing quality of intellectual excitement...
...teacher, says Wald, must be "the most committed student in the room." In lectures, "I am just trying to make things clear to myself?I find I am learning things all the time." And even when he is the only one talking, he considers it "a kind of dialogue. I am acutely aware of the expressions on the students' faces. A puzzled look stops me short." Facts, he argues, are "just raw material for understanding basic relationships, and the whole job of teaching is to weave a fabric of relationships and to attach this at so many points...