George Wald

GEORGE WALD was born in New York City in 1906, the son of Jewish immigrant parents. An award-winning biologist, he taught at Harvard University for forty-three years and was known as an outstanding teacher. In 1966, TIME agazine listed him in a cover story as "one of the ten best teachers in the country." Wald's long career of research on vision culminated in his discovery of how Vitamin A works in the retina, leading to the understanding of the chemical basis of vision, for which he shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1950, to the American Philosophical Society in 1958, and in 1963-64 he was a Guggenheim Fellow, spending the year at Cambridge University. He also received honorary degrees from the University of Berne, Yale University, Wesleyan University, New York University, McGill University, Clark University, and Amherst College. Wald spoke out on many political and social issues, and his fame as a Nobel laureate brought national and international attention to his views. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. In 1997, Wald died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety.