David H. Hubel

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

Life

Hubel studied medicine at McGill University with a bachelor's degree in 1947 and the MD Degree in medicine in 1951. Thereafter, a specialist training included a neurologist at the Montreal General Hospital ( Internship ) at the Montreal Neurological Institute ( Residency ) and from 1954 to the Johns Hopkins Hospital Johns Hopkins University ( Residency ) to. He investigated further at Johns Hopkins and the Walter Reed Army Institute before moving in 1959 to Harvard University Medical School, where he was an Assistant Professor in 1960 and 1965 Professor of Neurophysiology and Neuropharmacology. He was George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology and 1971 Senior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1968.

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

Hubel studied in the 1960s in collaboration with Torsten N. Wiesel in detail the structure and the neural processing of visual information in the visual cortex located in the occipital lobe, where they took cats and monkeys as experimental animals. They found a configuration of a plurality of fields of view with different functions, such as monkeys at 15, wherein the main processing in the primary field of view V1 is carried out, which produces an image of the retina, and where each group of neurons responded to very specific stimuli, for example, responded only to light some points, others on lines where there were different groups depending on the orientation of the line. They showed the structure into strips after ( around 400 microns width, both left and right eye adjacent strips ) and column units that run 3 to 4 mm through several layers of the cortex. Hubel and Wiesel characterized the function of the different layers. The other fields of view have a structure similar to V1, are arranged in a row ( where V1 is the furthest back to the cranium is ) are responsible for more complex information and breakdown with increasing compaction information (such as motion, color, shape ). According to their investigations, the visual cortex into one of the best known parts of the brain was.

They also studied the formation of the visual cortices functions during development, such that the stripe pattern with left / right dominance is formed only in infancy. If one eye covered in the critical age, this leads to visual impairment to 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 received along with Wiesel the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine " for their discoveries concerning information processing in the Sehwahrnehmungssystem ". 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 and a foreign member of the Royal Society. In 1993 he received the Ralph W. Gerard - Prize and many other awards, including the Helen Keller Award 1995, the Karl Spencer Lashley Prize in 1975, the Dickson Prize in 1979, the Glen A. Fry Medal in 1991 and the Charles F. Prentice Medal 1993. He is a multiple honorary doctorates ( McGill University, University of Manitoba, University of Western Ontario, Gustavus Adolphus College, Oxford University, Ohio State University).

Writings

  • Eye and brain. Neurobiology of vision, range Verlag 1989

With Wiesel:

  • Receptive fields of single neurons in striate cortex the cats, J. Physiol., Volume 148, 1959, S.574 -591
  • Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cats visual cortex, J. Physiol., Volume 160, 1962, pp. 106-154
  • Shape and arrangement of columns in striate cortex the cats, J. Physiol., Volume 165, 1963, S.559 -568
  • Receptive field of cells in the striate cortex of very young, visually inexperienced cats, J. Neurophysiol. , Volume 26, 1963, S.994 -1002
  • Binocular interaction in striate cortex of kittens reared with artificial squint, J. Neurophysiol. , Volume 28, 1965, pp. 1041-1059
  • The period of sucsceptibility to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kittens, J. Physiol., Volume 206, 1970, pp. 419-436
  • Laminar and columnar distribution of geniculo - cortical fibers in the macaque monkey, J. Comp. Neurol. , Volume 146, 1972, p 421-443
  • Functional architecture of macaque monkey visual cortex, Proc. Roy. Soc. London B, Volume 198, 1977, pp. 1-59 ( Ferrier Lecture )
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