Abstract
ON June 29, Prof. Ragnar Granit is to deliver at the Royal Institution the fourteenth Thomas Young Oration of the Physical Society, and his subject will be "The Electro-physiological Analysis of the Fundamental Problem of Colour Reception". The occasion will provide an opportunity for a first-hand account of Prof. Granit's recent studies of the electrical response of the retina, summaries of which appeared in Nature of January 2, 1943, p. 11, and June 16, 1945, p. 711. Some fifteen years ago, Prof. Granit was working at the Johnson Foundation of Medical Physics, University of Pennsylvania, on the general problem of the retina as a nervous centre; in these experiments he relied mainly on the subjective observations of flicker phenomena. Later, he worked in Sir Charles Sherrington's laboratory at Oxford, where he investigated and analysed the retinal action potentials which develop on stimulation of the retina by light; in this work his tests were carried out on the retinæ of decerebrated cats. Since then he has held the chair of physiology at the University of Helskinki and is now at the Nobel Institute of Neurophysiology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. The continued refinement of his experimental technique has enabled him to record the responses from individual receptors in the retina and to investigate their variation with wave-length. This work is of fundamental importance to the understanding of the processes of colour perception. The account of Granit's methods is of interest not only in connexion with vision but also in the much wider field of nerve physiology; indeed his studies of the retina now form only a part of his research activities.
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Prof. Ragnar Granit. Nature 155, 750 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155750b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155750b0