David H. Hubel

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David Hubel (medical forum, Boston 1992)

David Hunter Hubel (born February 27, 1926 in Windsor , Ontario , Canada , † September 22, 2013 in Lincoln , Massachusetts , USA ) was a Canadian physician, neurophysiologist and neurobiologist .

Life

Hubel studied medicine at McGill University in Montreal with a bachelor's degree in 1947 and received his MD in 1951 . This was followed by specialist training as a neurophysiologist at the Montreal General Hospital (internship), at the Montreal Neurological Institute (residency) and from 1954 in the USA at the Johns Hopkins Hospital at Johns Hopkins University (residency) in Baltimore . He continued his research at the "Johns Hopkins" and the Walter Reed Army Institute , where he worked on animal nerve cells during his military service from 1955 to 1958, before going to Harvard University Medical School in 1959 , where he was assistant professor in 1960 and professor in 1965 Neurophysiology and Neuropharmacology was. In 1968 he became the George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology and in 1971 a senior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Hubel was John Franklin Ender's Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge ( Boston ), Massachusetts , since 1982 .

Hubel studied in the 1960s in collaboration with Torsten Wiesel in detail the structure and neural processing of visual information in the occipital lobe contained visual cortex , where they took cats and monkeys as test animals. They found a structure of several fields of view with different functions, about 15 in monkeys, with the main processing taking place in the primary field of view V1, which creates an image of the retina and where the individual groups of nerve cells responded to very specific stimuli, e.g. B. some reacted only to points of light, others to lines, whereby there were different groups depending on the orientation of the line. They demonstrated the structure in strips (with a width of around 400 micrometers, each left and right eye adjacent strips) and columnar units that run 3 to 4 mm through several layers of the cortex. Hubel and Wiesel also characterized the different functions of the layers. The other fields of view have a similar structure to V1, are arranged one behind the other (with V1 being furthest back to the occiput) and are responsible for more complex information breakdown with increasing information compression (such as movement, color, shapes). According to their research, the visual cortex has become one of the best known parts of the brain.

They also examined the development of visual cortex functions in the course of development, for example that the stripe pattern with left / right dominance is only developed in infancy. If one eye is covered at a critical age, this leads to poor vision and even blindness in this part of the eye. The studies showed the high plasticity of the brain after birth and the importance of external stimuli for its development in the early development of children.

In 1981 he and Wiesel received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries about information processing in the visual perception system ”. From 1988 to 1989 he was President of the Society for Neuroscience .

Since 1971 he was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965) and a foreign member of the Royal Society . In 1982 he was accepted into the American Philosophical Society . In 1993 he received the Ralph W. Gerard Prize and many other prizes such as the Helen Keller Prize 1995, the Karl Spencer Lashley Prize 1975, the Dickson Prize 1979, the Glen A. Fry Medal 1991 and the Charles F. Prentice Medal 1993 In 2006 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame . He has multiple honorary doctorates (McGill University, University of Manitoba, University of Western Ontario, Gustavus Adolphus College, University of Oxford, Ohio State University).

Fonts

  • Eye and brain. Neurobiology of seeing (= spectrum library. Volume 20). Spectrum, Heidelberg 1989, ISBN 3-922508-92-8 (Original title: Eye, Brain, and Vision. Translated by Friedemann Pulvermüller, Joseph O'Neill, Helga Ginzler).
  • Illusions. Of perception and optical illusion. CD-ROM. Navigo Multimedia et al., Munich et al. 1997, ISBN 3-89695-113-0 .

with Torsten N. Wiesel:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ David H. Hubel, Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, dies at 87th obituary in the Washington Post, September 24, 2013 (accessed September 24, 2013).
  3. ^ Obituary for David Hunter Hubel in: The Boston Globe
  4. ^ Member entry by David H. Hubel at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on October 12, 2012.
  5. ↑ Member History: David H. Hubel. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 5, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Hubel, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hubel, David Hunter (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian neurobiologist, Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine 1981
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Windsor , Ontario , Canada
DATE OF DEATH 22nd September 2013
Place of death Lincoln , Massachusetts , United States