Good Beginning

Of all the 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.

Biologist Wald, 60, whose abilities as a lecturer in Harvard's "Nat Sci 5" have made him one of the great college teachers in the U.S. (TIME cover, May 6, 1966), has been primarily concerned with the eye's chemical makeup and reactions. Pursuing a "hunch" in the early 1930s, he discovered the presence of vitamin A in the retina, then went on to determine its presence and complex workings in the visual pigment. Now, he says with undiminished excitement, "we're on the edge of a whole series of new things" in knowledge of the eye, including a better explanation--perhaps eventually even a treatment--for color blindness.

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."

Along the same lines, Granit, 67, who was a professor of neurophysiology at the Royal Caroline Institute until last spring and is now a visiting professor at Oxford, 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.

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