Ragnar Granit

Ragnar Arthur Granit was born 30 October 1900, and spent his early career at the University of Helsinki tracing the retina's response to light, decoding the physiological basis of color vision one receptor at a time. The work was painstaking, fundamental — and it held. He moved to the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and pivoted: now the question was how the nervous system commands movement, the control circuits behind muscle and motion. In 1967 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and George Wald for cracking the primary visual processes in the eye…