Haldan Keffer Hartline, a Prize, and Two Accidents

Haldan Keffer Hartline’s story is at the same time ordinary and extraordinary. And so the story of his turn of the century American childhood is a familiar one. Born in 1903 and raised in central Pennsylvania, Hartline was the son of well-educated parents, both of whom taught at the Bloomsburg State Normal School (Nobelprize.org 1967), Keffer, as everyone would come to all him, was “brought up to become an ardent naturalist” (Grant and Ratliff 1985). Every recounting of his early childhood (G&R 1985, Barlow 1986, Ratliff 1990) remarks on his native naturalist spirit--his love of hiking, joining his father’s classes on geological field trips, and his parents’ careful cultivation of his inquisitive mind. Usually somewhere early into these romantic childhood accounts, Louis Agassiz’s dictum “Study Nature, not books” is invoked, with Keffer offered up as the child exemplar: a scientist by nature and nurture.

Somehow we expect stories like this to be told of a child who would grow up to win a Nobel Prize: it fits our most romantic view of science and history – a genius, destined for greatness from birth, shows up to solve problems no one else can. Well, there’s more to Hartline and his science than that, and in what follows I offer an account of two of his most important experiments in an attempt to temper the archetype of the scientific genius and deepen appreciation for the working scientist – for Haldan Keffer Hartline. As we will see, Hartline’s successes were due to his hard work, and his good luck: the basic ingredients of all discovery.

Suggested citation
LaTourelle, Jonathan Jacob. 2015. "The Neurobiology of Vision at the MBL". MBL History Project digital exhibit. http://history.archives.mbl.edu/exploring/exhibits/neurobiology-vision-mbl
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Note: There is no science without a scientist, and so the author has attempted to maintain the essential truth of that—namely that at each stage of the scientific process there is a person looking at evidence and making judgments. However there is almost no personal biography, and much of the professional biography of each author has been abridged dramatically. In spite of this, the reader should keep in mind that each of these individuals were complicated people who share at least a job description. George Wald once said, “A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy”. Each of these individuals had a scientific ethic, as well as a body of scientific work, and where possible, the author of each section has attempted to not forget the romanticism of the spirit of investigation, or the fact that many of these people were excited by a simple truth—after all, they were seeing things no one else had seen before. That majesty can be easy to forget if you are an outsider new to the complexities of visual physiology, but these scientists never forgot it.

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Universalizing Photochemical Theories of Vision: Hecht, Wald, and the Marine Biological Laboratory

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Haldan Keffer Hartline, a Prize, and Two Accidents

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