David Hunter Hubel. 27 February 1926 — 22 September 2013

David Hunter Hubel was one of the great neuroscientists of the twentieth century. His experiments revolutionized our understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying vision. His 25-year collaboration with Torsten N. Wiesel revealed the beautifully ordered activity of single neurons in the visual cortex, how innate and learned factors shape its development, and how these neurons might be assembled to ultimately produce vision. Their work ushered in the current era of analyses of neurons at multiple levels of the cerebral cortex that seek to parse out the functional brain circuits underlying behaviour. For these achievements, Hubel and Wiesel, along with Roger W. Sperry, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981.