Gunnar Svaetichin mastered high impedance microelectrode techniques while studying neurophysiology in the Karolinska Institute with Ragnar Granit.
Education
After attending schools in Karis and Helsinki, he went on to graduate from medical school at the University of Helsinki, where he also worked as a researcher During his medical studies in Helsinki, Svaetichin got to know the young Ragnar Granit, who had returned after some years in the United States and Oxford and become a professor of physiology. His first work as a doctor was when the Finnish winter war broke out and Svaetichin was drafted and sent to a first aid station located just behind the front lines.
Career
These enabled intracellular recording of light responses from retinal interneurons, a field that he founded. lieutenant was an imaginative area to pursue in the 1940s. He is the discoverer of South-potentials, now known to be retinal horizontal cell responses, and discovered both color opponent and non opponent types.
The discovery of neural color opponency ranks with the most significant findings in color vision in the 20th century.
The later decades of his career were spent at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research. In cooperation with Ragnar Granit, Svaetichin developed a new methodology for electrophysiological study of vision.
They made fine needle electrodes that could register signals from the major nerve cells in the retina, which sends its threads in the optic nerve to the brain. lieutenant was with this technique Ragnar Granit could perform his famous studies of color vision.
In 1956, showed by examining the external layers of fish retinas that electroretinograms display particular sensitivity to three different groups of wavelengths in the areas of blue, green and red.
This provided the first biological demonstration in support of the Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory. He also gave name to the South-potential, which was the first experimental evidence that opponency existed in the visual system. Jameson Doctorate., Hurvich Licentiate in Midwifery (1982).
Gunnar Svaetichin: man of vision.
Program(s) Clin Biol Reserve, 13, 307-10. Book prepared posthumously in Gunnar Svaetichin"s honor.