Hartline, Haldan Keffer

Hartline, Haldan Keffer

(born Dec. 22, 1903, Bloomsburg, Pa., U.S.—died March 17, 1983, Fallston, Md.) U.S. physiologist. He received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Experimenting on horseshoe crabs, he was the first to record the electrical impulses sent by a single optic-nerve fibre. He found that when one of the eye's receptor cells is stimulated, others nearby are depressed, enhancing contrast and sharpening perception of shapes. He showed how simple retinal mechanisms constitute vital steps in the integration of visual information. In 1967 he shared a Nobel Prize with George Wald and Ragnar Arthur Granit.

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Hartline, Haldan Keffer 

Born Dec. 22, 1903, in Bloomsburg, Pa. American physiologist and biophysicist. Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Hartline graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1927; from 1927 to 1929 he was a medical science research fellow at Johns Hopkins, and from 1929 to 1931 he was engaged in research at the universities of Leipzig and Munich. From 1943 to 1949, Hartline was professor of biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania; from 1949 to 1953, professor and chairman of the department of biophysics at Johns Hopkins University; and from 1953 to 1974, professor of biophysics at Rockefeller University in New York. He retired in 1975.

In the 1930’s, Hartline studied the neurophysiological functions of individual neurons in the retina of vertebrates. He is best known for his research, carried out jointly with others in the 1940’s and 1950’s, on the inhibiting interaction between adjacent photoreceptors in the retina of the Xiphosura order of arthropods. Hartline is a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. In 1967 he was awarded the Nobel Prize together with the Swedish physiologist R. Granit and with G. Wald.

WORKS

Studies on Excitation and Inhibition in the Retina. London, 1974.