George Wald

George Wald was an American scientist and activist who studied pigments in the retina. Born in New York City in 1906, he took his bachelor degree at New York University and a doctorate in zoology at Columbia University, then used a travel grant to work in Germany with Otto Heinrich Warburg, where he identified vitamin A in the retina. He left Europe in 1933 and from 1934 taught at Harvard University as instructor and then professor. He shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit for discoveries about vision. In 1970 he warned that civilization could end within decades without action on the problems facing mankind.