Ragnar Granit

Ragnar Arthur Granit (30 October 1900 – 12 March 1991) was a Finnish and Swedish neurophysiologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1967 along with Haldan Keffer Hartline and George Wald "for their discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye". Granit carried out fundamental research on the retina and the physiological mechanisms of colour vision at the University of Helsinki, and later investigated the neural control of movement at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

Early life and education

Ragnar Arthur Granit was born on 30 October 1900 in Riihimäki, Finland, at the time part of the Russian Empire, into a Swedish-speaking Finnish family whose roots in Korpo in the Åboland archipelago went back generations. His parents were the forester Arthur Granit and Albertina Helena (Bertie) Malmberg. Granit was raised in Oulunkylä, a suburb of the Finnish capital of Helsinki, and attended the Svenska normallyceum in Helsinki. He spent his childhood and youth summers in Korpo, where he sailed and fished with his cousins Lars-Ivar Ringbom, later an art historian, Anders Ringbom, later a professor of analytical chemistry, and Nils-Erik Ringbom, later a composer and intendent of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Granit grew up in a milieu more oriented towards literature and the arts than the natural sciences. Among his friends and classmates were the artist Torger Enckell and his brothers Olof Enckell, later a professor of Swedish literature, and Rabbe Enckell, who became an author and artist. At Svenska normallyceum, Granit participated in a literary discussion club led by the poet Gunnar Björling. He worked as editor of Studentbladet from 1923 to 1926, contributed to the first issues of the magazine Quosego, founded in 1928 as an organ for the literary avant-garde, and was editor of the magazine Finlands Röda Kors during the 1930s.