Biology lost one of its giants of the 20^th century with the passing of George Wald on April 12, 1997. Wald unraveled the nature of the light-sensing molecules used for vision and was the dominant force in this field for over forty years. Beginning with postdoctoral research in the early 1930s, Wald showed that the visual pigment molecules consist of a protein to which is bound a derivative of vitamin A called retinal. Retinal serves as chromophore for these molecules, absorbing the light and initiating conformational (shape) changes in the protein that lead eventually to the excitation of the photoreceptor cells. Wald’s findings represented the first instance that a biochemical role for a fat-soluble vitamin was established and were widely recognized. Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1967 for his monumental contributions to our understanding of the molecular basis of photoreception.

George Wald was born in New York City on November 18, 1906. The son of immigrant parents, he grew up in Brooklyn in a working-class neighborhood. He showed an aptitude for mechanical things and science from his youngest days. George went to Manual Training High School, now the Brooklyn Technical High School. He later felt this training was especially useful, enabling him to design and help build specialized laboratory equipment.

He entered Washington Square College in 1923. College was especially exciting for George – it introduced him to art, classical music, and literature, and he became enamoured with them all. He first considered a career in law, then in medicine, but neither engaged him. In his senior year, he happened upon Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith and was smitten by the possibility of doing biological research. He applied to Columbia University for graduate studies in zoology and was accepted.

The first year as a graduate student was a watershed year for George. He took a genetics course with T.H. Morgan and met his future mentor, Selig Hecht. Hecht was well known for his studies of vision in both simple organisms and man. As a graduate student, Wald first studied vision in the fruitfly, then human dark adaptation. Wald very much wanted to lay his hands on the molecules underlying vision, something not of great interest to Hecht. So in 1932, supported by a National Research Council (NRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship, he went to Berlin and the laboratory of eminent biochemist and Nobel laureate Otto Warburg.

This was the beginning of his Wanderjahre, which would bring him to three distinguished laboratories and provide him with key insights into the biochemistry of the visual pigments. In Warburg’s lab, his studies indicated that vitamin A was associated with the visual pigments, consistent with the known link between vitamin A deficiency and night blindness. After time with Paul Karrer in Zurich to confirm his results, George moved to Heidelberg with Otto Meyerhof. His work there was almost truncated by Hitler’s rise to power and the consequent NRC decree that he must return to the U.S. by the end of summer 1933. However, a shipment of 300 frogs arrived while lab members were on holiday, and thereby fell into George’s hands. He used their retinas to infer a biochemical cycle in the visual process. He completed his second fellowship year at the University of Chicago.

Wald assumed his first academic position in 1934 as Tutor in Biochemical Sciences at Harvard. He remained at Harvard his entire academic career, becoming Instructor and Tutor in Biology in 1935, Faculty Instructor in 1939, Associate Professor in 1944, and Professor of Biology in 1948. His research at Harvard initially confirmed and then extended his postdoctoral research. These studies brought him to Woods Hole in the summers to work at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). He returned to The MBL virtually every summer, teaching for many years in its famous Physiology Course and becoming, eventually, a Trustee of the Laboratory.

During World War II, Wald worked on an applied research project for the U.S. Army Board of Engineers on infrared viewing devices for night vision. After the war, he returned to studying visual pigment molecules and was joined by two individuals who were to play essential roles in his laboratory until he retired, and who themselves became distinguished investigators: Ruth Hubbard started as a graduate student and eventually become George’s second wife, and Paul Brown was Wald’s research assistant and long-time co-worker.

By the mid-1950s, the basic biochemistry of the visual pigment molecules was well understood, and in the early 1960s, George turned his attention to color vision. For members of the Wald laboratory in the ’50s and ’60s, it was an exceptionally lively and heady place. Lunch in the laboratory was an event, with John Edsall, Alex Forbes, Don Griffin and occasionally Jim Watson and their students participating. George presided over discussions of science, politics or whatever, and they were inevitably entertaining, provocative and stimulating.

George was one of Harvard’s best teachers. He introduced biochemistry to generations of undergraduates. He taught always with great wit and clarity. In 1961, he began his famous General Education course, entitled The Nature of Living Things, which he taught until his retirement. He started the course with his marvelous "Origin of Life" lecture and the second semester with an "Origin of Death" lecture. Thousands of undergraduates were enthralled by his excursions into cosmology, atoms and molecules, and contemporary biology. A number of his students were persuaded to enter biology or medicine because of the fascination of Nat Sci 5, as the course was called and numbered. George gained national attention from the course, and was named one of the country’s 10 best teachers by Time magazine in 1966.

The Vietnam War had a profound effect on Wald and was to lead him away from science. He was among the first in academia to speak out against the war and was a signer of a 1965 letter to The New York Times protesting the war. Winning the Nobel Prize in 1967 provided him the platform to speak out on political issues. In 1969, he participated in a teach-in at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and gave a speech called "A Generation in Search of a Future" that was published in the Boston Globe, The New Yorker and elsewhere. It eventually was translated into over 40 languages.

From that moment on, politics became his primary interest. He was a forceful spokesperson against the Vietnam War, nuclear arms proliferation and the military-industrial complex. In this effort, his wit and clarity served him well. When challenged that the arms race and the peacetime draft were "facts of life," he retorted, "No, those are the facts of death. I don’t accept them and I advise you not to accept them." After retirement in 1977, Wald gave up laboratory research to devote his time entirely to political causes. He traveled widely until the last two years of his life.

Wald is survived by four children: Michael and David from his first marriage, to Frances Kingsley in 1931, and Elijah and Deborah from his second marriage, to Ruth Hubbard in 1958.

Wald won numerous awards in addition to the Nobel Prize including the Eli Lilly Award in 1939, the Lasker Prize in 1953 and the Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959. The opening lines of his Nobel Prize lecture typify his approach to science and are a fitting close to this memoir.

"I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that one only has to listen."

John Edsall

Timothy Goldsmith

J. Woodland Hastings

Richard Lewontin

Donald Griffin

John Dowling, Chair