(Viking Press( 1947);fifth printing June 1948;hardcover no...)
Viking Press( 1947);fifth printing June 1948;hardcover no jacket-blue boards; 5 1/2x 8 1/2;H; 205 pages clean tan;., shelfwear rubbing to edges; name on title page;periodic table of the elements to #92 Uranium(a9)
(Band wat verkleurd / Discolouration, Traduit de l'américa...)
Band wat verkleurd / Discolouration, Traduit de l'américain par L. Keffler et E. Rocart / / Chemistry / Frans / French / Français / Französisch / soft cover / dust jacket / 14 x 18 cm / 220 .pp /
(Barcelona. 21 cm. 242 p. il. Encuadernación en tapa dura ...)
Barcelona. 21 cm. 242 p. il. Encuadernación en tapa dura de editorial con sobrecubierta. Revisada y ampliada con cuatro capítulos adicionales por Eugenio Rabinowitch ; versión española de Federico Armenter. Índice. Título original: Explaining the atom. Átomos .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario.
The Relation Between the Wave - Length of Light and Its Effect on the Photosensory Process. (Journal of General Physiology, January 20, 1921, Vol 3, No 3)
(Offprint with blue stapled card cover, little use, pages ...)
Offprint with blue stapled card cover, little use, pages clean with charts, very good
Selig Hecht was an American physiologist and biophysicist. He served as a professor of biophysics at Columbia University, and studied photochemistry in photoreceptor cells.
Background
Selig Hecht was born on February 8, 1892 in the village of Glogow, then a part of Austrian Poland, the eldest of five children (four of them boys) of Mandel Hecht and Mary (Mresse) Hecht. In 1898 the family emigrated to the Lower East Side of New York City, where the elder Hecht became a foreman in the men's clothing industry.
Education
Selig attended local public and Hebrew schools and at home was taught Hebrew by his father, a man of strong scholarly interests. To help pay his way through high school and college he worked as a bookkeeper in a woolen business.
At the College of the City of New York he concentrated at first in mathematics, but a course in zoology turned his interest to that field. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in 1913, having spent the previous summer on a fellowship at the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries station at Beaufort, North Carolina.
In 1915 he entered the graduate school at Harvard, where, working under the zoologist George H. Parker, he received the Ph. D. in 1917 with a thesis on the physiology of the marine organism Ascidia atra Lesueur.
Career
After graduation Hecht worked briefly as a chemist in an industrial laboratory and then (1913-1914) as a pharmacologist with the Department of Agriculture in Washington.
After a summer at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute at La Jolla, California, Hecht moved to Omaha, Nebraska, as assistant professor of physiology at the medical school of Creighton University, a post he held until 1921. Here he had neither time nor facilities for research, but he was able to spend his summers working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachussets, where acquaintance with Jacques Loeb exercised a profound influence on his scientific development.
With Loeb as sponsor, Hecht received a National Research Council fellowship in biology (1921-1924), followed by one from the General Education Board (1924-1926). During this period he carried out research with the photochemist E. C. C. Baly in Liverpool; with Lawrence J. Henderson at Harvard; at the zoological station in Naples; and with the physiologist Joseph Barcroft at Cambridge University.
In 1926, after five years without an academic post, Hecht was appointed associate professor and in 1928 professor of biophysics at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his life. In the biophysics laboratory that he organized there, he and his students investigated a variety of problems relating to visual functions, particularly in man, including dark adaptation, pattern vision, brightness discrimination, and color vision.
Hecht had an indelible effect on the development of the scientific understanding of photoreception. He brought into this field for the first time the clear concept that visual responses take place through physical and chemical processes amenable to quantitative study. He pointed out that all photoreception must begin with the absorption of light by a visual pigment (S) in the retina; that this pigment must be transformed by light to products (P); and that the economy of the system demanded that P revert to S, so establishing a steady state in the light permitting vision to go on, and the regeneration of S from P in darkness as the basis of dark adaptation. This simple paradigm served as model for a lifetime of experimentation.
Hecht's fundamental notion was that accurate measurements of visual responses in organisms ranging from clams to man should become explicable in terms of such a model. With his students, he provided an enormous body of exemplary measurements of visual functions, in the hope that whenever some aspect of visual physiology had been measured in his laboratory, the work would be so complete that it would never have to be repeated. Researchers in vision still refer to those measurements as among the most reliable and detailed that we possess. Another great contribution from his laboratory was the study of the minimum amount of light necessary to stimulate vision. His findings pointed to the fundamental conclusion that a dark-adapted rod in the human eye can be excited by absorbing one quantum of light--one photon--presumably by a single molecule of visual pigment. This concept of the ultimate limit of visual sensitivity has dominated much later thinking on the mechanisms of visual excitation.
During World War II Hecht carried out research for the armed forces, particularly on problems of night vision. His concern with the effort to abolish the military uses of atomic energy led him to become an active member of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and to produce an excellent book for the layman, Explaining the Atom (1947).
He died at his home in New York City at the age of fifty-five, of a coronary thrombosis. After cremation at the Ferncliffe Crematory, his ashes were scattered.
Hecht was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.
Interests
Hecht pursued his relaxations as seriously as his science. He understood music as do few nonprofessional musicians and was a talented painter in watercolors.
Connections
On June 3, 1917, Hecht married Cecilia Huebschman, whom he had met as an undergraduate. They had one daughter, Maressa.