David H. Hubel papers

David H. Hubel, 1926-2013, John Franklin Enders University Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus and Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine (1981), began his career at Harvard Medical School in 1959 as an Associate in Neurophysiology and Neuropharmacology. In 1960 Hubel received an Assistant Professorship; in 1965 he was appointed Professor of Physiology. Hubel served briefly as chairman of the Department of Physiology in 1966, returning to the newly formed Department of Neurobiology to resume full time research and teaching. In 1967 Hubel was named George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology. Hubel and co-recipient Torsten Wiesel were awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of information processing in the visual system, which led to treatments for several forms of blindness in children. In 1982 Hubel became the John Franklin Enders University Professor of Neurobiology, now Emeritus since his retirement in 2000. Hubel continued full time teaching, advising and research activities at Harvard Medical School, the latter which he undertook with Margaret Livingstone in his lab in the Department of Neurobiology.

Studying honors mathematics and physics, Hubel graduated from McGill University in 1947. He went on to the Faculty of Medicine at McGill, receiving his medical degree in 1951. At Montreal General Hospital Hubel completed a year of rotating internship, then a one-year neurology residency with Herbert Jasper at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Following this residency, Hubel completed a year of clinical neurophysiology. After completing a one year residency in neurology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Hubel was called for military service, and assigned to Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Neuropsychiatry Division. At Walter Reed, Hubel worked for six months with Michelangelo Fuortes on cat spinal cord research. He then began his own research in experimental neurophysiology comparing the spontaneous firing of single cortical cells in sleeping and waking cats. To facilitate his investigations, Hubel designed and developed a tungsten microelectrode and a technique for using it to record individual cell responses to stimuli. Using his electrode, Hubel was the first researcher “to see cells in an alert cat respond to any kind of environmental stimulation.” This invention facilitated extracellular research in many other laboratories. In 1958 Stephen Kuffler invited Hubel to continue his research at the Wilmer Institute of Ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins Hospital. At Johns Hopkins, Hubel began collaborating with Torsten Wiesel, a partnership which continued for twenty-five years. Together they began mapping receptive fields of cells in the visual cortex. In 1959 Hubel and Wiesel moved with Kuffler and his other research teams to Harvard Medical School, Department of Pharmacology as Associates. Hubel quickly discovered his passion for teaching. In 1966 this sub-department of Pharmacology was renamed and administratively separated to form the Department of Neurobiology. It was the first of its kind at Harvard Medical School and in the country, bringing together members from other traditional departments to create an inter-disciplinary approach, in this case with specialists in central nervous neurophysiology, synaptic neurophysiology and neurochemistry.

Over the course of their collaboration at Harvard Medical School, Hubel and Wiesel’s work with cats and monkeys demonstrated that a major function of the striate cortex was to elaborate orientation selectivity. They also identified simple and complex receptive fields, discovered end-stopped (hypercomplex) cells, differences in and functions of cortical and geniculate cells, investigated mammalian color neurophysiology by examining color sensitivities of the different spatial subdivisions of receptive fields in monkeys and described ocular dominance and orientation columns in detail. While mapping adult animal brains, Hubel and Wiesel also began to investigate the development of the visual system. They conducted research on kittens to determine whether the responses of cortical cells were innate or developed, and to learn about the effects of visual deprivation. Hubel and Wiesel discovered that visual deprivation affected cortical development, leading to an understanding that simple disuse of the optic nerve would affect anatomical development of the visual cortex. This discovery, along with their earlier physiological mapping research led to the finding of the importance of early treatment for strabismus, amblyopia and congenital cataracts in children, and resulted in their being named co-recipients of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, an award they shared with psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry.

Hubel received numerous awards and recognitions, including a term spanning from 1971-1996 in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. In 1971 Hubel was awarded the Research to Prevent Blindness Trustees Award for Outstanding Ophthalmic Achievement, shared with Wiesel. In 1972 the two collaborators also were recipients of the Louis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Sciences and the Jules Stein Eye Institute Award for distinguished ophthalmic research. In 1978 Hubel, Wiesel and Vernon Mountcastle were co-recipients of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry. Hubel was a past president of the Society for Neuroscience. Hubel held numerous prestigious fellowships at Harvard Medical School. He collaborated with Margaret Livingstone, working with the primary visual cortex to learn “how the activation of brain cells is related to an animal’s environment and behavior.” Hubel and his wife Ruth had three sons and four grandchildren. Ruth Hubel died in February 2013. David H. Hubel died of kidney failure on 22 September 2013 in Lincoln, Mass.