George Wald

George Wald was born in New York City on 18 November 1906, the son of Jewish immigrant parents. He went to public schools in Brooklyn and on to New York University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1927. After college, Wald studied zoology at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1932.

Wald was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship in Biology (1932-1934). Working in the laboratory of Otto Warburg in Berlin-Dahlem, Wald identified vitamin A in the retina of the human eye. Vitamin A had just been isolated in the laboratory of Professor Paul Karrer in Zurich. Wald visited Karrer's laboratory to complete the identification. After this, Wald did research in the laboratory of Otto Meyerhof at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, followed by a year in the Department of Physiology at the University of Chicago.

Wald came to Harvard in 1934 as a tutor in Biochemical Sciences. He served asInstructor and Tutor in Biology (1935-1939); Faculty Instructor (1939-1944); Associate Professor (1944-1948); and Professor of Biology (1948-1968). He was the Higgins Professor of Biology at Harvard University from 1968 to 1977, when he retired from teaching.

Wald's long career of research on vision culminated in his discovery of how Vitamin A works in the retina, leading to the understanding of the chemical basis of vision.

In 1967, George Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit "for their discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye."

Wald was also a political activist. He used his Nobel Prize prestige to promote a variety of progressive social and political causes. He was a critic of the Viet Nam War and a supporter of student protests. He opposed nuclear energy and lobbied for the reduction of nuclear arms. He also tried to get research on recombinant DNA moved away from Cambridge because of the possibility of contamination in the community.