The Story of a 25 Year Collaboration
Scientific collaborators Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel made significant advances in our understanding of the brain and perception. Their achievements were a work in progress for roughly a quarter century.
Published August 23, 2005
By Dorian Devins
Academy Contributor
An air of camaraderie pervaded The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) on March 31, 2005 as scientific collaborators Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel were joined by fellow Nobelist Eric Kandel in celebration of Wiesel and Hubel’s recently-published book, Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration. The full-to-capacity house included several scientific luminaries and at least one other Nobel Prize winner in the audience.
Kandel kicked off the evening with a vivid description of the pair’s groundbreaking work, characterizing it as “the most important advance in understanding the brain since Ramón y Cajal” at the turn of the 20th century. Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 in recognition of his work on the structure of the nervous system. While Cajal’s work centered on the morphological aspects of interconnections between different parts of the brain, Wiesel and Hubel’s work used modern cellular physiological techniques to show how these connections filter and transform sensory information both within and on the way to the primary visual cortex.
According to Kandel, “using imagination in addition to methodology is the key to the Hubel and Wiesel success.”
Hubel and Wiesel made several major contributions to our understanding of the brain and perception, including new insights into how the cerebral cortex functions in transforming sensory information. They also did work on binocularity, cellular organization in orientation and ocular dominance, and visual sensory deprivation.
Processing Visual Information
Our dominant sensory experiences are visual, and Wiesel and Hubel’s work showed how visual information is processed in the first few stages after it reaches the brain. They found that the part of the cortex devoted to the early stages of visual processing is arranged in columns, within which the nerve cells have common response properties. An analysis of the image is compiled from this information, and results in what we see.
In other experiments the team also investigated how visual deprivation affects development, which they tested by unilateral lid closure. Hubel and Wiesel found that when one of a newborn kitten or monkey’s eyelids is sutured shut for several weeks or months, the animal is found to be blind once the eye is reopened. When the eye closure is done in adult cats no such result is obtained. In both cats and monkeys there is thus a “critical period” of plasticity, following which sensitivity to deprivation declines and finally disappears.
Their work yielded profound findings, especially in the area of neural circuitry. Kandel described the cerebral cortex’s capability of carrying out novel kinds of transformation of a visual image. Hubel and Wiesel realized that the image is decomposed and then reconstructed later, and their findings influenced not just neuroscience but also areas like cognitive psychology, where they allowed practitioners to develop the idea that the brain creates an internal representation of the outside world. For this work, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981.
The People Behind the Science
As Kandel pointed out, however, Hubel and Wiesel’s science itself was just one aspect of the evening’s program. It was also an occasion to celebrate their book, a collection of their major papers along with biographical and historical information. But perhaps most importantly, Kandel and the audience were assembled to honor the long and productive collaboration and friendship of these two very different people.
Kandel characterized David Hubel as “whimsical and anti-authoritarian,” someone who “probably couldn’t run a grocery store,” a creative and musical person perhaps not most at home as an administrator. Torsten Wiesel, on the other hand, was a “quiet, humble person who has emerged as really one of the great scientific leaders in the academic community,” in Kandel’s words. “You name it, he runs it!”
As the evening progressed, Hubel and Wiesel reminisced about their partnership. Hubel spoke of the difficulty of working while they were at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The lull of the surf and general air of relaxation there was not a great motivation to get to the lab. Of their time together overall, he said it was like a “half-century long trip on a roller coaster.”
A Brotherly Relationship
Working and travelling together in their younger days created a brotherly relationship between the two. “We didn’t want to tell people that this kind of work isn’t horribly tedious because we thought that would invite competition,” said Hubel. Much of their success was due to the luck of finding each other at just the right point in the science’s history and in their own careers, and in their hitting it off as they did.
Typically modest, Wiesel gave credit to Hubel for most of the work necessary to create their recent book. In terms of their work in science overall, he said, “You may have the technical skill and the imagination and so on, but you also need luck in life to really have success.”
Wiesel also attributed much of the success of their careers to Steve Kuffler, one of the leaders in the emerging field of neuroscience in the 1950s and ‘60s. Kuffler had been chairman of the department of neurobiology at Harvard while Wiesel and Hubel were there, and his respect was reserved for those who showed up in the lab, did the experiments, and wrote them up. Wiesel said that despite his many administrative accomplishments, “I feel Steve Kuffler would look at me [now] with some disdain and state, ‘Torsten, why did you leave the lab? You’re supposed to do experiments!’”
What Makes Scientists Tick
Wiesel reiterated that he and Hubel had worked very reclusively. From early morning until late at night, they performed every component of their own experiments, from preparation of the animals at the outset to washing the glassware afterwards. By maintaining this atmosphere of privacy, they were able to keep the “primacy of the thoughts and the ideas” from being diluted. Over the years they did not work with many graduate students and postdocs, but were fortunate in the quality of those they did have.
This strategy obviously paid off. Wiesel attributes their motivation and that of scientists in general to “random reinforcement,” like that of B.F. Skinner’s famous pigeons. Wiesel and Hubel’s early discoveries about the visual cortex a few months into their work made it seem to them that one thing naturally led to next. They began without a hypothesis; rather, they had set out to use the new technology of the microelectrode to record the cells in different parts of the brain and try to understand how the cells cooperate. According to Wiesel, “We were explorers of unknown territory.”
Wiesel cited some other important factors aside from luck that lead to success in the sciences, including choosing the right problem to tackle, being observant, and having the right attitude and mentor. As a young scientist who came from Sweden to the U.S to learn more about the brain, he was frustrated by the limited knowledge available in the area. If he and Hubel hadn’t met and formed such a productive relationship, he would have returned to Sweden. One thing Wiesel worries about is that the current academic system does nothing to redirect those who might be better suited to other careers.
The Evolution of Neuroscience
In a question-and-answer session, Wiesel explained that the initial phase of their work was explorative, followed by a period of asking questions. Hubel stated that there was a misconception that “to do proper science it should be done in the image of physics, or the way most people think of physics.” He and Wiesel got ideas and tested them, but “we never would’ve expressed it in such exalted terms of having a hypothesis. One shouldn’t make up rules as to how Science with the capital ‘S’ is done or should be done.”
What surprises might be ahead for neuroscience in the way that Hubel and Wiesel’s discovery of orientation-specific cells once were? According to Wiesel, insights come in stepped points and are quite unpredictable. The study of olfaction has yielded some profound insights, but, for instance, our understanding of hearing is comparatively primitive. It is now an area of great interest to neuroscientists. The next frontier is unknown.
The field of neuroscience has grown exponentially over the years. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel’s groundbreaking work has been in no small way responsible for this. As it was best put by Eric Kandel, when we celebrate Wiesel and Hubel, “we’re not only celebrating science at its best, we’re not only celebrating two extraordinary people and a wonderful collaboration,” but we’re also celebrating “the reason science is exciting. We’re really celebrating the whole scientific enterprise in celebrating the two of them.”
Also read: Discovering Cancer Therapies through Neuroscience
About the Author
Dorian Devins is a New York-based radio producer whose programs have aired for over 10 years on WFMU, 91.1 FM in the greater metropolitan New York area. For three years she produced and hosted The Green Room, a weekly science radio program which was carried both on the radio and the Web. She currently hosts The Speakeasy, a weekly arts and cultural interview program. She has also conducted an ongoing series of interviews for the National Academy of Sciences’ Web site, does freelance writing, and works as an acquisitions editor of technical physics books.
Devins’ background has been mostly in the arts and publishing. She was founder and executive director of Science Matters, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to the public understanding of science.
