Ragnar Granit

Ragnar Arthur Granit was born on October 30, 1900, in Riihimäki into a Finland-Swedish family. Completing medical and philosophical doctorates at the University of Helsinki, he pursued specialized neurophysiology research at Oxford under Sir Charles Sherrington and at the University of Pennsylvania.

During the Winter War of 1939–1940, Granit served as a military physician in the Finnish armed forces before accepting a professorship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Granit pioneered microelectrode recordings from single retinal ganglion cells, demonstrating how different wavelengths of light stimulate distinct color-sensitive receptors, confirming the trichromatic theory of color vision. In 1967, he shared the Nobel Prize with Haldan Keffer Hartline and George Wald.