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George Wald (November 18, 1906 – April 12, 1997) was an American scientist and activist who studied in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.
In 1970, Wald predicted that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”Mark J. Perry (April 21, 2015) 18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year. aei.org
Wald was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1950, the American Philosophical Society in 1958, and in 1967 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries in vision. In 1966 he was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal by the OSA and in 1967 the Paul Karrer Gold Medal of the University of Zurich. In 1992, he was elected an Honorary Member of OSA.
Wald spoke out on many political and social issues and his fame as a Nobel laureate brought national and international attention to his views. He was a pacifist and vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. Speaking at MIT in 1969 Wald said, "Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed."Norman Solomon (September 6, 2010) A Speech for Endless War. zcommunications.org In 1980, he served as part of Ramsey Clark's delegation to Iran during the Iran hostage crisis.
With a small number of other Nobel laureates, he was invited in 1986 to fly to Moscow to advise Mikhail Gorbachev on a number of environmentalism. While there, he questioned Gorbachev about the arrest, detention and exile of Yelena Bonner and her husband, fellow Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov (Peace prize, 1975). Wald reported that Gorbachev said he knew nothing about it. Bonner and Sakharov were released shortly thereafter, in December 1986.
A member of the Circumcision Resource Center in Boston, he was one of the first scientists committed against circumcision but his article "Circumcision", rejected by The New York Times in 1975, was published in 2012 only by an English magazine.
Wald died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was married twice: in 1931 to Frances Kingsley (1906–1980) and in 1958 to the biochemist Ruth Hubbard. He had two sons with Kingsley—Michael and David; he and Hubbard had a son—musicologist and musician Elijah Wald—and a daughter, Deborah, a family law attorney. He was an atheist.
In the 1950s, Wald and his colleagues used chemical methods to extract pigments from the retina. Then, using a spectrophotometer, they were able to measure the light absorbance of the pigments. Since the absorbance of light by retina pigments corresponds to the that best activate photoreceptor cells, this experiment showed the wavelengths that the eye could best detect. However, since make up most of the retina, what Wald and his colleagues were specifically measuring was the absorbance of rhodopsin, the main photopigment in rods. Later, with a technique called microspectrophotometry, he was able to measure the absorbance directly from cells, rather than from an extract of the pigments. This allowed Wald to determine the absorbance of pigments in the .
Two of George Wald's speeches can be read on-line:
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