George Woods
George Wald (born November 18, 1906 in New York , USA , † April 12, 1997 in Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA) was an American biologist, physiologist , biochemist and Nobel Prize winner .
life and work
Wald graduated from New York with a degree in biology in 1928 and received his PhD in zoology from Columbia University in 1932 . This was followed by research stays as a scholarship holder of the National Research Council with Otto Warburg in Berlin, with Paul Karrer in Zurich and with Otto Fritz Meyerhof in Heidelberg. As a Jew, he had to leave Germany when the National Socialists came to power in 1933. He first came to the University of Chicago , then in 1934 to Harvard University . There he later became a professor.
In 1953, Wald received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and in 1967, together with Ragnar Granit and Haldan Keffer Hartline, the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the investigation of the physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye .
Among other things, he succeeded in deciphering the function of vitamin A (discovery of vitamin A1 = retinol and vitamin A2 = dehydroretinol in the retina ) and of the visual purple or rhodopsin in the rods of the retina. Already at Warburg in Berlin he was able to prove the connection between vitamin A and the visual process.
In 1967 he gave the Paul Karrer Lecture . In 1948 Wald was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1950 a member of the National Academy of Sciences . Since 1958 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society .
literature
- Gisela Baumgart: Forest, George. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1464 f.
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1967 award ceremony for George Wald
Individual evidence
- ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved October 11, 2015
- ↑ Member History: George Wald. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 8, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Forest, George |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physiologist and Nobel Prize winner |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 18, 1906 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York , USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 12, 1997 |
| Place of death | Cambridge , Massachusetts, USA |