Biographical Memoirs Volume 60 (1991) / Chapter Skim
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6. Selig Hecht
6. Selig Hecht
Pages 80-101
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In Hecht, great scientific capacities combined with equally superb gifts as a teacher, writer, and lecturer. His interests ranged widely, and everywhere they touched, he made striking personal contributions.
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EDUCATION AND EARLY LIFE Selig Hecht was brought to America as a young child from the village of Glogow, then Austrian Poland. The early part of the century was the period of the great migration to this country from Eastern Europe.2 The family settled in New York's lower East Side, where young Selig went to public and Hebrew schools anct was taught Hebrew at home by his father.
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The Ph.D. was granted Hecht in June 1917, and on the following clay he married Celia Huebschman, daughter of an immigrant Austrian family, whom he had met while at college in New York.
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in detail using another relatively simple system, that of the clam Mya. As his theory became more firmly established, Hecht grew more confident of its generality and essential correctness and turned to the analysis of a human visual function adaptation to darkness.
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aca( .emlc appointment. During this difficult period the warm friendship and confidence of Jacques Loeb, whom he had come to know at Woods Hole, was a continuing source of encouragement.
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Medical School and at Woods Hole. During this period he extended his view of the photoreceptor process to a theoretical analysis of brightness discrimination a characteristically global view that embraced the data for man and for the clam in one quantitative treatment.
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C O EU M B lA YEA RS ( ~ 926 -I 947) In the spring of 1926, Selig was offered simultaneously a post at Columbia and a projected chair at a major English university.
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As the only physiologist in Columbia's Department of Zoology, Hecht had a large measure of autonomy within his special sphere to construct a situation after his own design. In the lofty isolation of the thirteenth floor of the new Physics Building, commanding a superb southern view of the city and the Hudson River, he fitted out a compact set of laboratories ant!
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From page 89... ...
The entire laboratory came to rely on ShIaer's ingenuity and skill. "l am like a man who has lost his right arm," remarked Hecht on leaving Columbia—and Shiaer—in 1947, "and his right leg." In his Columbia laboratory, Hecht instituted investigations of human dark adaptation, brightness discrimination, visual acuity, the visual response to flickered light, the mechanism of the visual threshold, and normal and anomalous color vision.
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He visited many military installations to acquaint himself with their problems at first hand, taking researches into the field whenever that seemed likely to bring quicker and more practical results. He had a strong sense of the urgency of the war and no civilian timidity whatever.
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In his speech Hecht pointed out the need, now that the war had ended, to foster basic scientific research. He was also cleeply involved in the effort to abolish the military uses of atomic energy and to turn it toward!
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Photoreception Hecht launched his own investigations of photoreception with an intensive study of the relatively simple, unorganized systems associated with light reflexes in the ascidian Ciona and the clam Mya. These are highly manipulable organisms susceptible to wide temperature variation; their responses are definite ant} their reactions slow enough to be measured without elaborate apparatus.
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Color Vision In 1929, at the Thomas Young Centenary celebration at Cornell University, Hecht presented a brilliantly original synthesis of the disorganized quantitative data on human color vision the first attempt to provide a reasonably comprehensive theory in this field. Starting from the trichromatic theory propouncled by Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, Hecht positec3 the existence of three types of cones.
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Assuming, more or less arbitrarily, that all three cone types make equal contributions to the brightness of white light, Hecht derived spectral sensitivity functions for each. The last investigation in which he took part, however—a comparison of the brightness function in normal and colorblind subjects- led him to conclude that each type of cone makes a clifferent contribution to brightness, with the "recI" group contributing the most and the "blue" the least.
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The process of vision, however, is initiated by so few photons ant} therefore involves so few photopigment molecules, it falls outside the province of thermodynamic treatment. Indeed, the absolute threshold of human vision falls potentially inside Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle." There is no way to control the path of a single photon or the excitation of a single rod occasioned by a single molecule of rhoclopsin.
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that would guide him to fruitful experiment. Before starting experiments in human clerk adaptation, visual acuity, intensity discrimination, or color vision, he had already published theoretical approaches to these functions on the basis of existing data.
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Selig Hecht conveyer! a sense of wide spaces and clear light.
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3: 375. The nature of foveal dark adaptation.
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20:231. 1931 Die physikalische Chemie und die Physiologie des Sehaktes.
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1948 With Simon Shlaer, Emil L Smith, Charles Haig, and Tames C
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