David Hunter Hubel (February 27, 1926 – September 22, 2013) was a
Canadian American
Canadian Americans is a term that can be applied to American citizens whose ancestry is wholly or partly Canadian, or citizens of either country that hold dual citizenship.
The term ''Canadian'' can mean a nationality or an ethnicity. Canadia ...
neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the
visual cortex
The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and ...
. He was co-recipient with
Torsten Wiesel
Torsten Nils Wiesel (born 3 June 1924) is a Swedish neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was ...
of the 1981
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, accord ...
(shared with
Roger W. Sperry), for their discoveries concerning
information processing in the
visual system
The visual system comprises the sensory organ (the eye) and parts of the central nervous system (the retina containing photoreceptor cells, the optic nerve, the optic tract and the visual cortex) which gives organisms the sense of sight (th ...
. For much of his career, Hubel worked as the Professor of Neurobiology at
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...
and
Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...
. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry is an annual prize awarded by Columbia University to a researcher or group of researchers who have made an outstanding contribution in basic research in the fields of biology or biochemist ...
from
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
. In 1983, Hubel received the Golden Plate Award of the
American Academy of Achievement
The American Academy of Achievement, colloquially known as the Academy of Achievement, is a non-profit educational organization that recognizes some of the highest achieving individuals in diverse fields and gives them the opportunity to meet ...
.
Early life and education
David H. Hubel was born in
Windsor, Ontario
Windsor is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, on the south bank of the Detroit River directly across from Detroit, Michigan, United States. Geographically located within but administratively independent of Essex County, it is the southe ...
, Canada, to American parents in 1926. His grandfather emigrated as a child to the United States from the Bavarian town of
Nördlingen
Nördlingen (; Swabian: ''Nearle'' or ''Nearleng'') is a town in the Donau-Ries district, in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, with a population of approximately 20,674. It is located approximately east of Stuttgart, and northwest of Munich. It was b ...
. In 1929, his family moved to
Montreal
Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...
, 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.
[ From age six to eighteen, he attended Strathcona Academy in ]Outremont, Quebec
Outremont is an affluent residential borough (''arrondissement'') of the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It consists entirely of the former city on the Island of Montreal in southwestern Quebec. The neighbourhood is inhabited largely by fran ...
about which he said, " owemuch 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."[ He studied mathematics and ]physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
at McGill University
McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec
Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous ...
, 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 the Montreal General Hospital
The Montreal General Hospital (MGH) (french: Hôpital Général de Montréal) is a hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada established in the years 1818-1820. The hospital received its charter in 1823. It is currently part of the McGill University ...
.
Career
In 1954, Hubel moved to the United States to work at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM) is the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1893, the School of Medicine shares a campus with the Johns Hopkins Hospi ...
as an assistant resident in Neurology. He was later drafted by the army and served at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) is the largest biomedical research facility administered by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The institute is centered at the Forest Glen Annex, in the Forest Glen Park part of the uni ...
(WRAIR). There, he began recording from the primary visual cortex of sleeping and awake cats. At WRAIR, he invented the modern metal microelectrode
A microelectrode is an electrode used in electrophysiology either for recording neural signals or for the electrical stimulation of nervous tissue (they were first developed by Ida Hyde in 1921). Pulled glass pipettes with tip diameters of 0. ...
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 of Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
. In 1981, Hubel became a founding member of the World Cultural Council
The World Cultural Council is an international organization whose goals are to promote cultural values, goodwill and philanthropy among individuals. The organization founded in 1981 and based in Mexico, has held a yearly award ceremony since 198 ...
. From 1988 to 1989 he was the president of the Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is a professional society, headquartered in Washington, DC, for basic scientists and physicians around the world whose research is focused on the study of the brain and nervous system. It is especially well kn ...
. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
.
Research
The Hubel and Wiesel 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.[ In one experiment, done in 1959, they inserted a ]microelectrode
A microelectrode is an electrode used in electrophysiology either for recording neural signals or for the electrical stimulation of nervous tissue (they were first developed by Ida Hyde in 1921). Pulled glass pipettes with tip diameters of 0. ...
into the primary visual cortex
The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and ...
of an anesthetized cat. They then projected patterns of light and dark on a screen in front of the cat. They found that some neuron
A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. ...
s 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 neurons simple cell
A simple cell in the primary visual cortex is a cell that responds primarily to oriented edges and gratings (bars of particular orientations). These cells were discovered by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel in the late 1950s.
Such cells are tune ...
s."
Still other neurons, which they termed complex cell
Complex cells can be found in the primary visual cortex (V1), the secondary visual cortex (V2), and Brodmann area 19 ( V3).
Like a simple cell, a complex cell will respond primarily to oriented edges and gratings, however it has a degree of spa ...
s, detected edges regardless of where they were placed in the receptive field
The receptive field, or sensory space, is a delimited medium where some physiological stimuli can evoke a sensory neuronal response in specific organisms.
Complexity of the receptive field ranges from the unidimensional chemical structure of o ...
of the neuron and could preferentially detect motion in certain directions. These studies showed how the visual system constructs complex representations of visual information from simple stimulus features.[
]
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 of ocular 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. By depriving 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 deprivation amblyopia, a type of visual loss due to unilateral visual deprivation during the so-called critical period
In developmental psychology and developmental biology, a critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the org ...
. These kittens also did not develop areas receiving input from both eyes, a feature needed for binocular vision
In biology, binocular vision is a type of vision in which an animal has two eyes capable of facing the same direction to perceive a single three-dimensional image of its surroundings. Binocular vision does not typically refer to vision where an ...
. Hubel and Wiesel's experiments showed that the ocular dominance develops irreversibly early in childhood development. These studies opened the door for the understanding and treatment of childhood cataract
A cataract is a cloudy area in the lens of the eye that leads to a decrease in vision. Cataracts often develop slowly and can affect one or both eyes. Symptoms may include faded colors, blurry or double vision, halos around light, trouble ...
s and strabismus
Strabismus is a vision disorder in which the eyes do not properly align with each other when looking at an object. The eye that is focused on an object can alternate. The condition may be present occasionally or constantly. If present during a ...
. They were also important in the study of cortical plasticity.[
Furthermore, the understanding of sensory processing in animals served as inspiration for the SIFT descriptor (Lowe, 1999), which is a local feature used in computer vision for tasks such as ]object recognition
Object recognition – technology in the field of computer vision for finding and identifying objects in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the ...
and wide-baseline matching, etc. The SIFT descriptor is arguably the most widely used feature type for these tasks. Hubel was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1982.
Personal life
Hubel married Ruth Izzard in 1953; she died February 17, 2013.[Boston Globe]
Shirley Ruth (Izzard) Hubel
Legacy.com. Retrieved 25 September 2013 The couple had three sons and four grandchildren.[Denise Gellene (24 September 2013)]
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''. Retrieved 25 September 2013 He died in Lincoln
Lincoln most commonly refers to:
* Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), the sixteenth president of the United States
* Lincoln, England, cathedral city and county town of Lincolnshire, England
* Lincoln, Nebraska, the capital of Nebraska, U.S.
* Lincol ...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...
from kidney failure on September 22, 2013 at the age of 87.
See also
* Neocognitron
__NOTOC__
The neocognitron is a hierarchical, multilayered artificial neural network proposed by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1979. It has been used for Japanese handwritten character recognition and other pattern recognition tasks, and served as the ins ...
References
External links
*
David H. Hubel papers, 1953-2005 (inclusive), 1966-1991 (bulk) H MS c 253. Harvard Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Mass.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hubel, David H.
1926 births
2013 deaths
Canadian expatriate academics in the United States
Canadian neuroscientists
Canadian Nobel laureates
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Founding members of the World Cultural Council
Harvard University faculty
History of neuroscience
Johns Hopkins University faculty
United States Army Medical Corps officers
McGill University Faculty of Science alumni
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
People from Windsor, Ontario
Neurophysiologists
Vision scientists
McGill University Faculty of Medicine alumni
Canadian neurologists
Canadian Fellows of the Royal Society
Members of the American Philosophical Society