Republication of The Journal of Physiology (2009) 587, 2733-2741: An introduction to the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel

摘要

It is with enormous pleasure that I add my voice to that of others of my generation in celebrating the semicentenary of the 1959 publication of Hubel and Wiesei's first paper in The Journal of Physiology entitled: 'Receptive fields of single neurons in the cat's striate cortex' (Hubel & Wiesel, 1959). This paper set the stage for the continuous flow of outstanding papers that emerged over the next twenty-odd years from the Hubel and Wiesel collaboration. Their work and that of Vernon Mountcastle opened up the modern study of the cerebral cortex. As a result of their extraordinary accomplishments, Hubel and Wiesel received the Gross Horwitz Prize together with Vernon Mountcastle in 1975, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981 together with Roger Sperry.It was on the occasion of the Gross Horwitz Prize, on whose committee I served, that I was invited to introduce Mountcastle, Hubel and Wiesel. My initial comments in that introduction were in fact directed toward an excellent scientist, a member of our Prize committee, who commented during our deliberations that Mountcastle, Hubel and Wiesel seemed to represent superb science, but their work had limited biological generality. To which I replied: 'You are right, it does not apply to the kidney or the spleen. It is much more restricted. It only helps to explain the workings of the mind.'