HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

George Wald, Nobel Winner, Dies at 90

George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus, died on April 12 of natural causes at his home in Cambridge. He was 90. Wald shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for research on how the eye sees and passes visual images to the brain.

One of the first academics to speak out against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, he was a hero to many students in the 1960s. He also addressed such issues as the arms race, nuclear power and weapons, and human rights. Wald referred to this activity as "biology with a vengeance" and "survival politics."

When he received the Nobel Prize, he expressed his feelings about being a scientist. "A scientist lives with all reality," Wald said. "To know reality is to accept it and eventually to love it. A scientist is in a sense a learned child. There is something of the scientist in every child. Others must outgrow it; scientists can stay that way all their lives."

Wald taught at Harvard for 43 years and was known as an outstanding teacher with an engaging sense of humor. In 1966, Time listed him in a cover story as "one of the ten best teachers in the country."

Wald was born in New York City on Nov. 18, 1906, the son of immigrant Jewish parents who worked in the garment industry. He received a bachelor's degree in zoology from New York University in 1927. He earned a doctorate from Columbia University in 1932. However, his family said the degree was never officially awarded because he never fulfilled a requirement to submit 200 copies of his thesis.

In 1932 to 1934, Wald did research in Germany, and then at the University of Chicago. He joined the Harvard faculty as a tutor in biochemistry in 1934 and spent the next 43 years teaching and doing research at the University.

His research included studies of how vitamin A improves vision. He also studied how cells in the retina perceive color, black and white and pass images to the brain.

Wald's collaborators included Ruth Hubbard, a biochemist whom he married in 1958. She was his second wife.

In 1967, he shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology with Haldan Hartline, a professor of physics at Rockefeller University, and Ragnar Grandit, a Swedish neurophysiologist.

In 1969, Wald gave a widely acclaimed speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology decrying the Vietnam War as one of "the most shameful episodes in the whole of American history." He also criticized the arms race, saying "there is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war."

After leaving Harvard in 1977, Wald lectured and traveled widely in the interests of peace and human rights. Although forbidden to do so, he went to Iran in 1980, during the hostage crisis. Wald made former President Richard Nixon's "enemies list," a fact of which he was proud, and was arrested several times during various protests.

Wald, however, was honored more than he was arrested. He won the Lasker Award, one of the most prestigious in medical research. Wald received the Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Eli Lilly Award of the American Chemical Society, and the Proctor Medal of the Association of Research in Ophthalmology. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous honorary degrees.

Wald was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1950 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1958.

He is survived by his wife, Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology emerita, and three sons: Michael, of Elmira, N.Y., David, of Monument Beach, Mass., and Elijah, of Somerville, Mass. He is also survived by a daughter, Deborah, of San Francisco, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Funeral services will be private and a memorial service will be announced later.