Background
George Wald was bornon November 18, 1906, in Manhattan, New York, United States, into the family of Ernestine Rosenmann and Isaac Wald. He was raised in Brooklyn, New York.
George Wald was bornon November 18, 1906, in Manhattan, New York, United States, into the family of Ernestine Rosenmann and Isaac Wald. He was raised in Brooklyn, New York.
George attended Brooklyn High School. He earned a bachelor of science degree in zoology at New York University. Then he went to Columbia University to do graduate work, receiving a masters degree in 1928 and his PhD in 1932.
After completing his studying, Wald received a National Research Council Fellowship in Biology during 1932 - 1934. He worked first in the laboratory of Otto Warburg in Berlin-Dahlem, Germany. There he first identified vitamin A as one of the major components of pigments in the retina and part of the process that turns light into sight. He completed the identification in the laboratory of Paul Karrer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, the laboratory in which Vitamin A had just been isolated. Wald next worked in the laboratory of Otto Meyerhof at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. There he discovered retinal (vitamin A aldehyde), a component of the visual cycle, in a batch of frogs imported from Hungary. Wald completed the second year of his fellowship at the University of Chicago in 1933 - 1934.
In 1934 Wald was appointed a tutor in biochemical sciences at Harvard University, where he spent the rest of his academic career. He became instructor and tutor in biology (1935 - 1944), associate professor (1944 - 1948); professor (1948 - 1968), Higgins Professor of Biology (1968 - 1977), and Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus after 1977. He also was a visiting professor of biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley for the summer term in 1956. As his reputation grew, he frequently lectured to packed classrooms and his energetic style aroused students' interest in science.
In the late 1930's Wald discovered that the pigment of rhodopsin is the light-sensitive chemical in the rods, the cells in the retina responsible for night vision. He found rhodopsin was derived from opsin, a protein, and retinene, a modified form of Vitamin A. For more than 20 years, Wald's research colleague was Paul K. Brown, who started out as his research assistant, then became a full-fledged collaborator. With Brown, Wald studied cones, the retinal cells responsible for color vision, and found that color blindness is caused by the absence of either of the pigments sensitive to red and yellow-green, two different forms of Vitamin A that exist in the same cone.
Hubbard joined Brown and Wald and formed a productive research team, "the nucleus of a laboratory that has been extraordinarily fruitful as the world's foremost center of visual-pigment biochemistry", according to John Dowling in Science. In ensuing years, Wald poured his efforts into what he called "survival politics."
In 1980, Wald served as part of Ramsey Clark's delegation to Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. He served as president of international tribunals on human rights issues in El Salvador, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Zaire, and Guatemala. In 1984, Wald was one of four Nobel Prize laureates who went to Nicaragua on a "peace ship" sent by the Norwegian government. With a small number of other Nobel laureates, he was invited in 1986 to fly to Moscow to advise Mikhail Gorbachev on a number of environmental questions. George died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997.
He declared his support for anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. On March 4, 1969, Wald gave a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology titled "A Generation in Search of a Future." He called some political leaders "insane" and referred to American "war crimes" in Vietnam. The speech was widely reprinted and distributed.
Wald’s personal belief in the unity of nature and the kinship among all living things is evidenced by the substantial roles he played in the scientific world.
Quotations:
"Our business is with life, not death."
"Nature is my religion, and it's enough for me. I stack it up against any man's. For its awesomeness, and for the sense of the sanctity of man that it provides."
In 1950 Wald was elected to the National Academy of Science and in 1958 to the American Philosophical Society. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston and of the Optical Society of America. As a Guggenheim fellow, he spent a year in 1963 - 1964 at Cambridge University in England, where he was elected an Overseas fellow of Churchill College. He became an honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1969.
Quotes from others about the person
No one has contributed more to our understanding of the visual pigments and their relation to vision than George Wald.
George was married twice: in 1931 to Frances Kingsley and in 1958 to the biochemist Ruth Hubbard. He had two sons with Kingsley — Michael and David; he and Hubbard had a son — the award-winning musicologist and musician Elijah Wald — and a daughter, Deborah, a prominent family law attorney.