Granit, Ragnar, 1900–1991, Swedish physiologist, M.D., Univ. of Helsinki, 1927. A professor at the Univ. of Helsinki from 1927, he joined the faculty of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, in 1940. Granit was a co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Haldan K. Hartline and George Wald for their discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye. Granit demonstrated that light inhibits as well as stimulates impulses along the optic nerve. He also showed that some of the nerve fibers in the eye respond to the entire light spectrum, while others are sensitive to just a narrow band within the spectrum and are therefore color specific.
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