George Wald

Wald’s first marriage was to Frances Kingsley in 1931. With Frances, Wald had two sons, Michael and David. Their marriage ended in a divorce.

He married Ruth Hubbard in 1958. Hubbard bore him a son, Elijah Wald—the award-winning musicologist and musician—and a daughter, Deborah, a renowned family law attorney.

He breathed his last on April 12, 1997 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

George Wald was born on November 18, 1906, in New York City, to Ernestine Rosenmann Wald and Isaac Wald. His parents were Jewish immigrants.

Young Wald gained his primary and secondary education from schools in Brooklyn. He later enrolled at the Brooklyn Technical High School in New York from where he graduated in 1922.

Wald gained admission at the Washington Square College at New York University. He graduated with a Bachelor degree in Science in 1927. In 1932, Wald earned the PhD degree in zoology from Columbia University. During his doctorate studies, Wald served as the student and research assistant of Professor Selig Hecht.

Upon completing his doctorate degree, George Wald received a travel grant from US National Research Council. Making most of the opportunity, he travelled to Germany to work under the supervision of Otto Heinrich Warburg.

Together with Warburg, Wald identified the presence of vitamin A in the retina. Meanwhile, vitamin A then had just been isolated by scientist, Paul Karrer, in Zurich, Switzerland. Wald travelled to Zurich to complete the identification at Karrer’s laboratory.

Following his work at Zurich, Wald moved to Heidelberg, Germany where he worked briefly with Otto Fritz Meyerhof at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, before moving to the University of Chicago in 1933. At the University of Chicago, he spent his time researching at the laboratory of the Department of Physiology.

In 1934, Wald moved to Harvard University where he took up the post of a tutor in Biochemical Sciences. From 1935, he served as an instructor and tutor in Biology, later taking up the post of a Faculty Instructor from 1939 to 1944, Associate Professor from 1944 to 1948 and finally Professor of Biology from 1948. Meanwhile, in the summer term of 1956, Wald served as the visiting Professor of Biochemistry at the University of California.

At the Harvard University, Wald indulged in studies that showed how vitamin A improved vision. He also studied how cells in the retina perceive colour, black and white, and passed images to the brain.

George Wald is known for his work on the physiology of the eye. His studies showed how vitamin A improved vision and how cells in the retina perceived colours and passed images to the brain. Through his experiments he discovered that Vitamin A was a component of the retina. It was yielded when the pigment rhodopsin was exposed to light along with protein opsin. As such, he proved that vitamin A was essential in retinal function.