George Wald; Nobel Prize Winner, Rights Activist

George Wald, 90, Nobel Prize winner and international human rights activist. Wald shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology with two other scientists for his work on how light causes the chemical reactions that send impulses along the optic nerve to the brain. His co-winners were Swedish neurologist Ragnar Granit and New York Rockefeller Institute researcher Haldan Keffer Hartline, who shared research in primary chemical and physiological visual processes in the eye. Wald also helped discover vitamin A in the retina in 1932 when he was a National Research Council fellow in Germany. He joined the Harvard University faculty in 1934 and taught and did research there for 43 years. Wald spoke occasionally at Southern California educational institutions, including USC and Pomona College, about physiology and human rights. He spoke out publicly against the war in Vietnam and visited North Vietnam to try to determine the status of prisoners. Among his other topics were the Cold War, the arms race and nuclear power. Wald served as president of international tribunals investigating human rights abuses in El Salvador, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Zaire and Guatemala. On Saturday in Cambridge, Mass.