Other pioneers in vision research at the MBL included Stephen Kuffler, founder of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard, and Edward MacNichol, Jr., who directed the year-round Laboratory of Sensory Physiology at the MBL in the 1970s and early '80s. MacNichol built the world's best photon-counting microspectrophotometer and did pioneering work on the biochemistry of color vision. The vision work at the MBL continues today, carried on by Grass Fellows at the beginning of their careers and veteran biologists whose careers overlapped with Nobelists Wald and Hartline. The ambitious effort to unravel vision has come far enough that scientists who study nature's eyes have been stalking bigger quarry for some time now. The poet may believe the eyes reveal secrets of the heart, but the scientist thinks eyes provide a window to the brain.
Some neurobiologists even speak of the eyes as if they are part of the brain.
One example of non-vision lessons learned in the retina comes from a team of MBL summer scientists, including Harris Ripps and former Grass Fellow Haohua Qian who recently discovered that skates may use zinc to increase nerve cell responses to GABA, a common neurotransmitter. Zinc was not known as a neuromodulator capable of increasing GABA responses before the recent discovery in skate retinas. Closer to the original target, vision studies are promising to shed light on how organisms process information about the world. We're really looking for the neural basis of behavior. Simultaneously, an electrode attached to the animal takes a reading of the response of a single nerve fiber.