David Hunter Hubel
(born February 27, 1926,
Windsor
, Ontario, Canada?died September 22, 2013, Lincoln,
Massachusetts
, U.S.) was a Canadian American neurobiologist, corecipient with
Torsten Nils Wiesel
and
Roger Wolcott Sperry
of the 1981
Nobel Prize
for Physiology or Medicine. All three scientists were honoured for their investigations of
brain
function, with Hubel and Wiesel sharing half of the award for their collaborative discoveries concerning
information processing
in the visual system.
Hubel attended
McGill University
in
Montreal
, receiving a
bachelor’s degree
in 1947 and an M.D. in 1951. He held positions at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital (where his association with Wiesel began), and the
Walter Reed
Army Institute of Research before joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School, along with Wiesel, in 1959. They began
collaborating
on research that same year.
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Faces of Science
One of their outstanding achievements was the analysis of the flow of nerve impulses from the
retina
to the sensory and motor centres of the brain. Using tiny electrodes, they tracked the electrical discharges that occur in individual nerve fibres and brain
cells
as the retina responds to light and the patterns of information are processed and passed along to the brain.
In 1965 Hubel became professor of
physiology
and, in 1968, George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology. He cowrote (with Wiesel)
Brain Mechanisms of Vision
(1979) and
Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration
(2004). His other works include
The Visual Cortex of the Brain
(1963),
The Brain
(1984; with
Francis Crick
), and
Eye, Brain, and Vision
(1988). Hubel and Wiesel were also awarded (with Vernon Mountcastle of Johns Hopkins) the 1978 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for their research on
discerning
the structural and functional elements of the visual cortex.