AAAS Science and Human Rights Program

Report on Science and Human Rights

Spring 2004 Vol XXIV, No. 1

Torsten N. Wiesel, President-Emeritus, Rockefeller University

Biography

Torsten N. Wiesel, President-Emeritus, Rockefeller University Torsten Wiesel received his M.D. from Karolinksa Institute in Sweden in 1954. He has been President-emeritus at Rockefeller University since 1998, when he stepped down after seven years of service as Rockefeller's president. Under his leadership 30 new laboratories conducting vanguard research in key areas of biology, chemistry and physics were added, and the renowned Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center joined with Rockefeller University in 1996. Professor Wiesel joined the Rockefeller faculty in 1983 to head a new laboratory of neurobiology, and later that year he was named the university's Vincent and Brooke Astor Professor. Prior to that he was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology.

In 1998 Professor Wiesel was elected president of the International Brain Research Organization, which is based in Paris, and was named Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program in 2000. He also serves on numerous Boards, including Chair of the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences.

In 1981 Professor Wiesel shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studies of how visual information collected by the retina is transmitted to and processed in the visual cortex of the brain. He received the Presidential Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 1998. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, where he presently serves as member of the Council. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine. Since 1994 Professor Wiesel has chaired the Committee of Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine and has served as a member of the executive committee of the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies. Professor Wiesel is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a foreign member of the Royal Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Medicine.