Wald Is Given Nobel Prize For Experiments on Vision

George Wald, professor of Biology, was awarded a Nobel Prize yesterday for his biochemical discoveries on the working of the human eye.

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.

This is the 15th Nobel Prize awarded to a Harvard scientist, and the sixth in the last seven years.

The research that earned Wald the award began in Germany more than three decades ago, when he discovered Vitamin A in the retina. The retina is the membrane that receives the visual image from the lens and passes it on to the brain through the optic nerve.

Wald later discovered that the three pigments of vision are all composed of vitamin A linked to a protein. The difference in the pigments, he found, was due to the difference in the proteins. Wald's wife, Ruth Hubbard, discovered that vision depends on the shape of the vitamin A molecule, and that the role of light is to change the shape of the molecule, triggering the vision process. After that, she found, light plays no role in vision.

In recent years, Harvard's newest Nobel laureate has been devoting his research hours to the chemistry of color vision and color blindness.

For six years, Wald has also been teaching Nat Sci 5, the University's introductory course in biology. He was chosen last year by Time Magazine as one of the nation's top 10 college teachers.

At a hastily called press conference on the top floor of the Biological Laboratories yesterday, Wald said teaching Nat Sci 5 "takes a lot of time, is very distracting, and interferes with my research life, but I try to manage."

Previous Winners

The medicine and physiology prize was the first of four to be awarded this month. The literature prize winner will be announced today and the chemistry and physics prizes will be announced October 30.

Harvard's last two winners were in 1965, when Julian S. Schwinger won in physics and Robert B. Woodward in chemistry. Schwinger earned his award with his pencil, resolving a contradiction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Woodward was cited for synthesizing several complex chemicals, including chlorophyll and cortisone.

The last medicine and physiology winner at Harvard was Konrad E. Bloch, in 1964, for his work with cholesterol.