biography
pronunciation:
[wawld]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1906–97)
|
| biography:
| Biochemist, born in New York City, New York, USA. He was a research fellow at the University of Chicago and in Europe (1932–4), and then joined Harvard (1934–77). While in Berlin (1933), he discovered vitamin A in the retina, and in subsequent research he determined how the retinal rod cells enable black-and-white night vision. During the late 1950s, his investigations of the three types of retinal cone cells demonstrated that these cells' colour reception is due to the presence of three different protein pigments. For this work, he shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was a dedicated and popular lecturer who believed that the natural world is ‘of chance, but not accident’, and described a scientist's ongoing intellectual development as that of a ‘learned child’. He was active against the Vietnam War, the arms race, and the development of nuclear power plants. |
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