Wiesel, << VEE zuhl, >> Torsten Nils (1924-…), a Swedish neurobiologist, won the 1981 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his discoveries about the way that the brain processes information from the eyes. Wiesel shared the prize with American physician David Hubel (who worked with him) and with American biologist Roger W. Sperry, whose brain research explored the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. Wiesel and Hubel concentrated their studies on the visual cortex, the part of the brain that turns the signals from the eyes into visual images. They found that instead of merely projecting an image from the retina onto the brain, each signal from the eye undergoes analysis in a system of specialized nerve cells in the visual cortex.
Wiesel was born in Uppsala, Sweden. In 1954, he received a medical degree from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In 1955, he went to the United States to take up a research position at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore. There he met Hubel. In 1959, they both moved to Harvard University where Wiesel taught until 1983. Weisel became professor of neurobiology at Rockefeller University in New York City in 1983. He served as president of the university from 1992 to 1998.
See also Hubel, David Hunter ; Sperry, Roger Wolcott .
