Nobel laureate Hubel dies at 87
Harvard Medical School Professor David H. Hubel, whose discoveries in visual processing and development ushered in the modern study of the cerebral cortex and changed the way childhood cataracts and strabismus (“cross-eye”) were treated, died on Sept. 22 of kidney failure in Lincoln, Mass. He was 87. Hubel, the John Enders Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus, and longtime research partner Torsten Wiesel shared half of the 1981 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their groundbreaking insights into the structure and function of the visual cortex and the importance of exposure to certain visual stimuli shortly after birth for normal vision development. (The other half of that year’s prize went to Roger Sperry for finding that the two hemispheres of the brain have specialized functions.) “David was one of the great scientists of his generation,” said Michael Greenberg, Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and chair of the Department of Neurobiology at HMS....