Wald, George

(born Nov. 18, 1906, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died April 12, 1997, Cambridge, Mass.) U.S. biochemist. He taught at Harvard University from 1934–77. His outstanding contributions were on the importance of vitamin A, the mechanisms of the photochemical reactions in the rod cells that enable night vision, and the identification of the colour-sensitive pigments in the cone cells (see photoreception; retina). He shared the Nobel Prize in 1967 with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Arthur Granit. He was a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War.

Wald, George (1906– ) biochemist; born in New York City. He was a research fellow at the University of Chicago and in Europe (1932–34), then joined Harvard (1934–77). While in Berlin (1933), he discovered vitamin A in the retina; in subsequent research he determined how the retinal rod cells enable black-and-white night vision. During the late 1950s, his investigations of the three types of retinal cone cells demonstrated that these cells' color reception is due to the presence of three different protein pigments. For this work, he shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in physiology. He was a dedicated and popular lecturer who believed that the natural world is "of chance, but not accident," and described a scientist's ongoing intellectual development as that of a "learned child." He was active against the Vietnam war, the arms race, and the development of nuclear power plants.