Torsten Wiesel, in collaboration with David H. Hubel, provided fundamental insight into physiology of vision. Wiesel's work on charting the visual or striate cortex, the posterior section of the cerebral cortex, provided new insights into the complexity of the visual process that also proved to have direct clinical applications. Wiesel's discovery of critical periods in childhood development for learning to see led to earlier clinical intervention in visual problems in children. In 1981 Wiesel, along with Hubel and another brain researcher, Roger W. Sperry, shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Torsten Nils Wiesel was born on June 3, 1924, in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Anna-Lisa Bentzer Wiesel and Fritz S. Wiesel, the chief psychiatrist at the Beckomberg Mental Hospital in Stockholm. Wiesel lived at his father's hospital as a youth, attending a private school where he was more interested in sports than academics. However, this attitude changed in...