David H. Hubel | |
|---|---|
 Hubel in 1992 | |
| Born | David Hunter Hubel (1926-02-27)February 27, 1926 Windsor, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | September 22, 2013(2013-09-22) (aged 87) Lincoln, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Nationality | American-Canadian[3] |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Known for | Visual system |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neurophysiologist |
| Institutions | |
David Hunter HubelFRS (February 27, 1926 – September 22, 2013) was anAmerican Canadianneurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of thevisual cortex. He was co-recipient withTorsten Wiesel of the 1981Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared withRoger W. Sperry), for their discoveries concerninginformation processing in thevisual system. For much of his career, Hubel worked as the Professor of Neurobiology atJohns Hopkins University andHarvard Medical School. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded theLouisa Gross Horwitz Prize fromColumbia University.[4][5][6] In 1983, Hubel received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement.[7]
Hubel was born inWindsor, Ontario, Canada, to American parents in 1926. His grandfather emigrated as a child to the United States from the Bavarian town ofNördlingen. In 1929, his family moved toMontreal, where he spent his formative years. His father was a chemical engineer and Hubel developed a keen interest in science right from childhood, making many experiments in chemistry and electronics.[3] From age six to eighteen, he attended Strathcona Academy inOutremont, Quebec, about which he said, "[I owe] much to the excellent teachers there, especially to Julia Bradshaw, a dedicated, vivacious history teacher with a memorable Irish temper, who awakened me to the possibility of learning how to write readable English."[3] He studiedmathematics andphysics atMcGill University, and then completed medical school there in 1951 and followed that with three years of residency (a year of internship and two of residency in neurology) at theMontreal General Hospital.[3][8][9][10][11][12]
In 1954, Hubel moved to the United States to work atJohns Hopkins School of Medicine as an assistant resident in Neurology.[12] He was laterdrafted by the army and served atWalter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). There, he began recording from the primary visual cortex of sleeping and awake cats. At WRAIR, he invented the modern metalmicroelectrode out of Stoner-Mudge lacquer and tungsten, and the modern hydraulic microdrive, which he had to learn basic machinist skills to produce. In 1958, Hubel moved to Johns Hopkins and began his collaborations with Wiesel, and discovered orientation selectivity and columnar organization in the visual cortex. One year later, he joined the faculty ofHarvard University. In 1981, Hubel became a founding member of theWorld Cultural Council.[13] From 1988 to 1989 he was the president of theSociety for Neuroscience. He was a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences, and theAmerican Philosophical Society.[14][15][16]
The Hubel andWiesel experiments greatly expanded the scientific knowledge of sensory processing. The partnership lasted over twenty years and became known as one of the most prominent research pairings in science.[17] In one experiment, done in 1959, they inserted amicroelectrode into theprimary visual cortex of an anesthetized cat. They then projected patterns of light and dark on a screen in front of the cat. They found that someneurons fired rapidly when presented with lines at one angle, while others responded best to another angle. Some of these neurons responded to light patterns and dark patterns differently. Hubel and Wiesel called these neuronssimple cells."[18]Still other neurons, which they termedcomplex cells, detected edges regardless of where they were placed in thereceptive field of the neuron and could preferentially detect motion in certain directions.[19] These studies showed how the visual system constructs complex representations of visual information from simple stimulus features.[20]
Hubel and Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for two major contributions: firstly, their work on the development of the visual system, which involved a description ofocular dominance columns in the 1960s and 1970s; and secondly, their work establishing a foundation for visual neurophysiology, describing how signals from the eye are processed by visual parcels in the neo-cortex to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors, and color detectors, building blocks of the visual scene. Bydepriving kittens of using one eye, they showed that columns in the primary visual cortex receiving inputs from the other eye took over the areas that would normally receive input from the deprived eye. This has important implications for the understanding of deprivationamblyopia, a type of visual loss due to unilateral visual deprivation during the so-calledcritical period. These kittens also did not develop areas receiving input from both eyes, a feature needed forbinocular vision. Hubel and Wiesel's experiments showed that the ocular dominance develops irreversibly[verification needed] early in childhood development. These studies opened the door for the understanding and treatment of childhoodcataracts andstrabismus. They were also important in the study of corticalplasticity.[20]
Furthermore, the understanding of sensory processing in animals served as inspiration for theSIFT descriptor (Lowe, 1999), which is a local feature used incomputer vision for tasks such asobject recognition and wide-baseline matching, etc. TheSIFT descriptor is arguably the most widely used feature type for these tasks. Hubel was elected aForeign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1982.[1]
Hubel married Ruth Izzard in 1953; she died February 17, 2013.[21] The couple had three sons and four grandchildren.[17] He died inLincoln,Massachusetts, from kidney failure on September 22, 2013, at the age of 87.[22][23]
, accessed 11 October 2020
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