Haldan Keffer Hartline was a renowned physiologist who spent almost half a century investigating the process of vision. An early fascination with the metabolism of nerve cells led him to study the workings of the eye, especially the retinal mechanisms involved in vision and the electrical activity occurring in the individual cells of the retina and optic nerve. His comparative studies of the retinas of arthropods, mollusks, and vertebrates--representing each of the three major phyla having well-developed eyes--established principles of retinal physiology, thus providing the foundations for further investigations into the neurophysiology of vision and leading to an enhanced understanding of the wider realm of sense perception. For his work on analyzing the chemical and physiological retinal mechanisms of vision, he shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Hartline was born in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, to Daniel Schollenberger Hartline and Harriet Franklin Hartline. He attended college at Lafayette...