Happy 100th year anniversary Dr. Haldan Keffer Hartline!

Haldan Keffer Hartline

source: Wikipedia

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Haldan Keffer Hartline's graduation from the Bloomsburg State Normal School, the forerunner of present-day Bloomsburg University. Keffer's parents were both teachers. His father, Dr. Daniel S. Hartline, was a professor and biology department chair from 1897-1935 and his mother Harriet Keffer Hartline, served on the biology faculty. The Hartline Science Center at Bloomsburg University is named in honor of the Hartline family.  After graduating from the “college prep program” at the State Normal School in 1920, H. Keffer Hartline went on to Lafayette College, Johns Hopkins Medical School, and eventually to a position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City.  Hartline investigated the very nature of vision—how photoreceptors of the retina convert light stimuli into electrical signals that are conducted along a neural pathway to the brain. His colleague Floyd Ratliff stated that “Hartline’s basic studies on the integrative action of the retina provided the foundation for practically every advance in the neurophysiology of vision.”  In 1967,  Haldan Keffer Hartline shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with George Wald and Ragnar Granit for their work on elucidating the mechanisms of vision.  

To celebrate the 100th year anniversary of Dr. Hartline's graduation from Bloomsburg, the BU chapter of the Society of Physics Students hosted a symposium in reflect on Dr. Hartline's work, vision, and legacy.  Presenting at the symposium were BAHS professors Dr. Thomas Klinger, Dr. John Hranitz, and Dr. Clay Corbin. 

But what is more, if we have succeeded in adding to the basic understanding of our universe and ourselves, we will have made a contribution to the totality of human culture.

                                                                  Haldan Keffer Hartline










 


Source:  Bloomsburg University Archives with special thanks to Robert Dunkelberger.

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