Torsten Wiesel

Torsten Wiesel
Born	3 June 1924 (1924-06-03) Uppsala, Sweden
Nationality	Swedish
Known for	visual system
Notable awards	1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Torsten Nils Wiesel (born 3 June 1924) was a Swedish co-recipient with David H. Hubel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.

Biography and Early Career

Wiesel was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1924, the youngest of five children. In 1947, he began his scientific career in Carl Gustaf Bernhard's laboratory at the Karolinska Institute, where he received his medical degree in 1954. He went on to teach in the Institute's department of physiology and worked in the child psychiatry unit of the Karolinska Hospital. In 1955 he moved to the United States to work at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under Stephen Kuffler. Wiesel began a fellowship in ophthalmology, and in 1958 he became an assistant professor. That same year, he met David Hubel, beginning a collaboration that would last over twenty years.

In 1959 Wiesel and Hubel moved to Harvard University. He became an instructor in pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, beginning a 24-year career with the university. He became professor in the new department of neurobiology in 1968 and its chair in 1971. Torsten Wiesel joined the faculty of Rockefeller University in 1983 as Vincent and Brooke Astor Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and served as president of the university from 1991 to 1998. At Rockefeller University he remains the director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior. He is currently emeritus at Rockefeller and a visiting professor at the Karolinska Institute, and shares his time between New York and Stockholm.

Research

The human eye captures images on its retina. But what we "see"—form, detail, color, depth, contrast, and so on—is a result of how the brain receives and rebuilds the signals from the retina. In the 1960s and 1970s, the pioneering studies of Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel revealed the pattern of organization of brain cells that process vision and how this organization relates to function. They also discovered how connections between nerve cells filter and transform sensory information on its way from the retina to the cerebral cortex, and how the cortex changes during development in response to experience. In 1981 Wiesel and Hubel received the Nobel Prize "for their discoveries concerning the visual system," shared with Roger W. Sperry.

An experiment published in 1959 launched Wiesel and Hubel's collaboration of more than 20 years. Using a then-new electrophysiological technique of recording the activity of single brain cells in cats and macaque monkeys, they found that most cortical cells respond to contours of specific orientation. Further experiments (in cats and monkeys) led to the discovery of ocular dominance columns, the preference of groups of cells that process visual stimuli to respond predominantly to input from one or the other eye. Then, knowing that children born with cataracts did not develop normal vision after removal of the cataracts, they did a series of experiments to understand what happens to the brain's visual processing system when one eye was occluded by closing the lid. Wiesel and Hubel found that when an animal lacked vision in one eye during a critical early period of development, cells in the brain's primary visual cortex expanded into the areas that normally would have received signals from that eye. This research showed that early in life there is a critical period during which the neural connections present at birth can be lost or modified if they are deprived of stimuli.

Improved therapies for children born with cataracts, which should be removed within a few weeks after birth for vision to develop normally. Similarly, that children with strabismus should be corrected during the critical period were a direct result of Wiesel and Hubel's findings. Beyond such practical applications, their work opened the field of the modern study of the cerebral cortex—the brain area responsible for thought, reasoning, and memory—and laid the foundation for research on sensory and motor systems.

In another long-term collaboration Wiesel worked on the detailed neural circuitry of the visual cortex with Rockefeller University neurobiologist Charles Gilbert, research that revealed horizontal connections that have since been found in other cortical regions as well. These often very extensive connections are of fundamental importance for interaction within and outside a given cortical region.

Later Career and Advocacy

After retiring as president, Wiesel turned his attention to international science advocacy. From 2000 to 2009, he served as secretary general of the Human Frontier Science Program, headquartered in Strasbourg, France, established to support international, innovative and interdisciplinary basic research in the life sciences. He currently serves as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). He was chair of the board of governors of the New York Academy of Sciences (2001–2006); and he was the academy's chairman and interim director in 2001-2002. He is now its honorary chair for life. Wiesel has long(1992? – 2009) served as chair of the scientific advisory committee of the Pew Scholars Program. In 1991 he also helped initiate its Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences. The program provides support for Latin American researchers for postdoctoral training in the United States and he still chairs its review committee. He is a founding member of the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, a nonprofit alliance established in 2004 to support (collaborative) research co-operation between scientists IN the two communities. Wiesel served as chair of the board of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center (1995–2001), president of the International Brain Research Organization (1998–2004). He has been a member of the boards of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an advisory board member of the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI). He currently serves on the scientific advisory boards of a number of research institutes in Japan, China, India, Brazill and chaired the scientific advisory board of China's National Institute of Biological Science (NIBS) in Beijing (2004 -2010).

Wiesel is active as a global human rights advocate. He is a founding member of the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies. He served for 10 years as chair of the committee on human rights of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, and in recognition of this important work was awarded the David Rall Medal from the Institute of Medicine in 2005. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Wiesel has received the National Medal of Science (2005), the Dr. Jules C. Stein Award presented by the Trustees for Research to Prevent Blindness 1971), the Ledlie Prize from Harvard, Columbia University's Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1978), the Gerard Prize of the Society for Neuroscience, the Scientific Achievement Award from the National Eye Institute, and the Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research.

He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1980) and its Institute of Medicine. Wiesel also is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a foreign member of the Royal Society, the Indian National Science Academy , the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Honorary Degrees

1967 A.M. (Honorary) Harvard University

1982 Doctor of Medicine (honoris causa) Linkoping University,

1982 Doctor of Medicine and Surgery (honoris causa) Ancona University, ITALY

1982 Doctor of Science (Honorary) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

1987 Doctor of Science (Honorary) New York University, New York

1987 Doctor of Science (Honorary) University of Bergen, NORWAY

1989 Doctor of Medicine (Honorary) Karolinska Institute, SWEDEN

1990 Doctor of Humane Letters (Honorary) Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

1992 Doctor of Science (Honorary) Harvard Medical School

1993 Doctor of Science (Honorary) University of Connecticut, Storrs

1994 Doctor of Science (Honorary) Ohio State University, Columbus

1994 Doctor of Science (Honorary) State Univ. of NY, College of Optometry, New York City

1995 Doctor of Science (Honorary) Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

1996 Doctor of Science (Honorary) University of Arizona, Tucson

2010 Doctor of Science (Honorary) The University of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

2010 Doctor of Science (Honorary) De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

1998 Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa), Universidad Miguel Hernandez, Alicante, SPAIN

2003 Doctor of Science (Honorary) The Rockefeller University, New York, NY

2004 Doctor of Science (Honorary) Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

2004 Doctor of Science (Honorary) Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine

Awards

1971 The Dr. Jules C. Stein Award, Research to Prevent Blindness

1972 The Lewis S. Rosenstiel Prize, Brandeis University, Massachusetts

1972 Ferrier Lecture, Royal Society of London

1975 The Friedenwald Award, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology

1976 The Grass Lecture, Society for Neuroscience

1977 The Karl Spencer Lashley Prize, American Philosophical Society

1978 The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, Columbia University

1979 The Dickson Prize, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1980 The George Ledlie Prize, Harvard University

1980 Society for Scholars, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

1981 -- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with David Hubel and Roger Sperry.

1983 William D. Stubenbord Visiting Prof., Cornell Univ. Medical College, New York

1989 W.H.Helmerich III Award, The Woodlands, Texas

1996 Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research

1998 Presidential Award, Society for Neuroscience

2005 Institute of Medicine David Rall Medal

2005 * National Medal of Science, 2005 (US).

2006 Spanish National Research Council (CSIC – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas) Gold Medal

2006 Children’s Eye Foundation, Marshall M Parks, MD Medal of Excellence [Shared with David Hubel]

2009 * Order of the Rising Sun, Grand Cordon, 2009 (Japan).

See also

• David H. Hubel
• Single-unit recording

Selected Publications

Hubel DH and Wiesel TN. Receptive ?elds of single neurones in the cat's striate cortex. J Physiol, 1959, 148: 574-591
http://jp.physoc.org/content/148/3/574.full.pdf+html

Hubel DH and Wiesel TN. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. J Physiol, 1962, 160: 106-154
http://jp.physoc.org/content/160/1/106.full.pdf+html

Wiesel TN and Hubel DH. Effects of visual deprivation on morphology and physiology of cells in the cat's lateral geniculate body. J Neurophysiol, 1963, 26: 978-993
http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/reprint/26/6/978

Hubel DH and Wiesel TN. Receptive fields of cells in striate cortex of very young, visually inexperienced kittens. J Neurophysiol, 1963, 26: 994-1002
http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/reprint/26/6/994

Wiesel TN and Hubel DH. Single-cell responses in striate cortex of kittens deprived of vision in one eye. J Neurophysiol, 1963, 26: 1003-1017
http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/reprint/26/6/1003

Hubel DH and WIEsel TN. Receptive fields and functional architecture of monkey striate cortex. J Physiol, 1968, 195: 215-243
http://jp.physoc.org/content/195/1/215.full.pdf+html

Hubel DH and Wiesel TN. The period of susceptibility to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kittens. J Physiol, 1970, 206: 419-436
http://jp.physoc.org/content/206/2/419.full.pdf+html

Hubel DH and Wiesel TN. THE FERRIER LECTURE: Functional architecture of macaque monkey visual cortex. Proc R Soc Lond B, 1977, 198: 1-59
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/198/1130.toc

Gilbert CD and Wiesel TN. Morphology and intracortical projections of functionally characterized neurons in the cat visual cortex. Nature, 1979, 280: 120-125

Gilbert CD and Wiesel TN. Columnar specificity of intrinsic horizontal and corticocortical connections in cat visual cortex. J Neurosci, 1989, 9: 2432-2442

Further Reading

Hubel DH and Wiesel TN. Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration. New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2005 The Journal of Physiology, Special Section Reviews: Celebrating the Work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel
http://jp.physoc.org/content/587/12.toc Kandel ER. An introduction to the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. J Physiol, 2009, 587: 2733-2741
http://jp.physoc.org/content/587/12/2733.short

References

• Berlucchi, Giovanni (2006). "Revisiting the 1981 Nobel Prize to Roger Sperry, David Hubel, and Torsten Wiesel on the occasion of the centennial of the Prize to Golgi and Cajal.". Journal of the history of the neurosciences 15 (4): pp. 369–75. 2006 Dec. doi:10.1080/09647040600639013. PMID 16997764 
• Shampo, M A; Kyle, R A (1994). "Torsten Wiesel--Swedish neurobiologist wins Nobel Prize.". Mayo Clin. Proc. 69 (11): pp. 1026. 1994 Nov. PMID 7967753 
• Korczyn, A (1981). "[Nobel prize winners in medicine--1981 (Torsten Wiesel, David Hubel)]". Harefuah 101 (12): pp. 378–9. 1981 Dec 15. PMID 7042494 
• Prasanna, Venkhatesh V (2011). "Do we learn to see?". Resonance: Journal of Science Education 16 (1): pp. 88–99. 2011 Jan 12.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12045-011-0013-4. 

External links

• Nobel Prize Biography
• The Official Site of Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize

http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/43