Born in Sweden, Torsten Wiesel began his scientific career at the Karolinska Institute, where he received his medical degree in 1954. After spending a year in Carl Gustaf Bernhard¡¯s laboratory doing basic neurophysiological research, he moved to the United States to be a postdoctoral fellow with Stephen Kuffler. It was at Johns Hopkins where he met David Hubel in 1958, and they began working together on exploring the receptive field properties of neurons in the visual cortex. Their collaboration continued until the late seventies.
Hubel and Wiesel¡¯s work provided fundamental insight into information processing in the visual system and laid the foundation for the field of visual neuroscience. They have had many achievements, including¡ªbut not limited to¡ªthe discovery of orientation selectivity in visual cortex neurons and the characterization of the columnar organization of visual cortex through their discovery of orientation columns and ocular-dominance columns. Their work earned them the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981, which they shared with Roger Sperry.