Med School Professors Cited for Eye Research

Two Harvard Medical School Professors will share a $25,000 prize for research shedding light on how the brain "sees" and on the causes of blindness originating in early childhood.

Dr. David M. Hubel, Berry Professor of Neurobiology and Dr. Torsten N. Wiesel, Professor of Neurobiology, received the Trustees Award presented by Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc. (RPB). The award was established in 1966 to recognize "extraordinary scientific contributions to the science of ophthalmology."

Hubel and Wiesel, who have collaborated for many years, discovered that sight is controlled by a hierarchy of brain cells, with each cell passing on a small fragment of highly specialized visual information to a growing complexity of cells. These fragments are integrated into a complete image.

They have found that vital functions of these cells may "turn off" forever if not properly stimulated by signals from the eye during a critical early stage of development.

"It has been known what cells in the brain lead to the visual pathway," Hubel said last week. "The main thing we've been involved with is recording from those cells and finding out what they do and what they're for.

"We're trying to find out how the brain takes from the eye. The cells are taking what's biologically relevant from the outside world and extracting features from that," he said.

The scientists recorded the electrical activity of individual neurons of the visual centers in the brains of anesthetized experimental animals--primarily kittens and monkeys.

Fine metal electrodes are placed in contact with brain cells in the visual cortex, and these record oscillographically the cell's discharge of nerve impulses in response to patterns of light projected on a screen viewed by the animals.

Some cells process information regarding direction, others regarding contour, or light intensity and so forth.

Dr. Jules Stein, chairman of RPB, said the findings of Hubel and Wiesel are having a revolutionary influence in the treatment of a number of blinding conditions in the very young, including strabismus--commonly known as crossed eyes--a condition in which the two eyes do not operate in concert to produce a single image.

A worldwide ailment, cross-eyedness affects an estimated one to two per cent of all children in some form.

Hubel said that most opthamologists like to wait until a child is about eight years old before operating to correct strabismus. "If you're going to do it, however, you have to do it at a very young age--when the child is about a year old. At the age of eight, there isn't much recovery," he said.

Wald's Work

Hubel and Weisel said their research was not related to that done by Dr. George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology. Wald's research on visual pigments earned him a Nobel Prize in Biology.

"The difference between his research and ours can be seen by looking at a transistor radio. He was looking at how the transistor work. We're looking at how they're strung together," Hubel said.

Hubel was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1926 and received his medical degree from McGill University Medical School in 1951. Wiesel was born in Upsala, Sweden, in 1924. He received his medical degree from the Karinska Institute in Stockholm in 1954.

Both began their research in an effort to discover how the brain works and how normal cells in the brain operate. "We're trying to find out what a cell's thing is, what it does in daily life," Hubel said.

They both turned to the eye as a window into the brain. "We worked separately in vision recording from single cells in different places, using slightly different methods," Wiesel said.

They met and began working together at John Hopkins in a lab run by Dr. Stephen W. Kuffler, Winthrop-Professor of Neurobiology. They moved to Harvard with Kuffler in 1959.

Funds for the $25,000 honorarium are provided by the members of RPB's Board of Trustees