David H. Hubel

David H. Hubel was born on February 27, 1926 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, to American parents. He graduated from McGill University with a degree in mathematics and physics in 1947 and then entered medical school at the same university. He completed his residency in neurology at the Montreal General Hospital and then joined the US Army in 1954, where he worked at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There, he began to record the electrical activity of neurons in the primary visual cortex of cats and monkeys. He moved to Johns Hopkins University in 1958 and started his collaboration with Torsten Wiesel, who became his lifelong research partner. They discovered the existence of orientation-selective cells, which respond to edges and bars of specific orientations, and ocular dominance columns, which are regions of the cortex that receive input from one eye or the other. They also showed the importance of early visual experience for the normal development of the visual system, and the effects of deprivation and plasticity. They published their findings in a series of landmark papers that revolutionized the field of visual neuroscience. In 1959, Hubel and Wiesel moved to Harvard University, where they continued their research until their retirement. Hubel became a professor of neurobiology in 1968 and the John Franklin Enders University Professor in 1981. He also served as the president of the Society for Neuroscience in 1980. He received many awards and honors for his work, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981 (shared with Wiesel and Roger Sperry), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1978, the National Medal of Science in 1982, and the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1977. He also wrote several books, including Eye, Brain, and Vision in 1988 and Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration in 2004. He died of kidney failure on September 22, 2013 in Lincoln, Massachusetts, at the age of 87. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential neuroscientists of the 20th century and a pioneer of the study of the visual system.