No . 130
The Trusty Servant
Professor Horace Basil Barlow FRS ( I , 35-39 ) died on 5 th July 2020
The Obituarist , Alex Roe ( G , 72-75 ), pays tribute :
In his own words , Horace Barlow , who has died aged 98 , was born with a scientific silver spoon in his mouth : through his mother , Nora , a botanist , he was descended from a line of famous names , among whom his great-grandfather , Charles Darwin , and Darwin ’ s grandfathers , Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgewood , are the most celebrated . His father , Sir Alan Barlow , was a senior civil servant as well as an expert on Chinese ceramics and his paternal grandfather was physician to Queen Victoria ’ s household .
While he was at Win Coll , his contemporaries included Freeman Dyson , James Lighthill and Christopher Longuet-Higgins , who all became leading theoreticians or applied mathematicians .
From 1940-44 , he studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge : his director of studies was the eminent biophysicist , William Rushton . He won a Rockefeller studentship to Harvard , but delayed his departure for a year of wartime research on the design of
As Palmer Cup winner , 1939 oxygen systems for scuba diving . He completed his medical training at University College Hospital , by which stage it was clear that he wanted to continue as a research neurophysiologist . With a Medical Research Council studentship , he worked from 1947-50 in Cambridge under Edgar Adrian , who had won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his observations on the activity of sensory nerves . While there , Barlow devised a highly sensitive method of measuring eye movements by photographing a reflection from a droplet of mercury placed on the edge of the cornea of a volunteer .
He became a fellow of Trinity in 1950 , and then a fellow and lecturer in Physiology at King ’ s College , 1954-64 . His research investigated the visual system at the level of single neurons and their interactions in both humans and animals . His emphasis was on understanding the act of seeing , through the underlying machinery of vision . In 1964 he was appointed Professor of Physiological Optics and Physiology at the University of California , Berkeley ; in 1973 , he returned to Cambridge as Royal Society Research Professor of Physiology with a fellowship at Trinity College .
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and awarded the Society ’ s Royal Medal in 1993 . In the same year he received the Australia Prize for research into the mechanisms of visual perception . Other awards include the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience ( 2009 ) and Ken Nakayama Prize from the Vision Sciences Society ( 2016 ).
Barlow was perhaps best known for his analysis of the way that visual information is encoded as significant nerve signals . He was the first to show ( in frogs ) the fundamental organisation of optic nerve fibres and discovered that the retina is not merely ‘ film in a camera ’, but also reduces the amount of redundant information reaching the brain . He was able to make difficult ideas seem simple : soft-spoken but resolute in his opinions and endlessly curious about the natural world , he continued to write about the brain , working in his department and visiting Trinity well into his nineties . A brilliant thinker and an inspiration , his definition of intelligence was ‘ the art of good guessing ’.
He was received Ad Portas ( in absentia ) in 2011 .
He married Ruthala Salaman in 1954 , dissolved 1970 , and then Miranda Weston-Smith in 1980 , who survives him together with four daughters from his first marriage and a son and two daughters from the second .
Obituaries in The Times , The Telegraph , The Guardian and Nature Neuroscience .
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