While the Nobel Prizes are known for honoring exemplary science, and the Ig Nobels are given for science that seems outlandish, the Golden Goose Awards fall in between. Three years ago the Golden Goose Awards were established to honor federally funded science that at one time seemed obscure, but subsequently contributed to a major scientific advance. This year ASCB member Torsten Wiesel along with David Hubel won a Golden Goose Award for their work.
In the 1950s and 60s Wiesel and Hubel studied how cats’ brains responded to spots of light on a screen. Although it sounds like a recipe for the ultimate cat video, it led them down the path to discovering neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to change neural pathways due to changes in the environment or other parts of the body. Their discoveries on information processing in the visual system earned them the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
From their research on cats, and also monkeys, they learned that some neurons would respond to vertical lines, and others to horizontal lines. They also found one eye tended to dominate the input signal. Their next step was to determine whether these responses to visual input were nature or nurture. Newborn animals are wired for visual processing, they found, yet looking at humans, Wiesel and Hubel were puzzled by the fact that children born with cataracts that were later corrected, still had severe visual impairments. Returning to their feline experimental subjects, Wiesel and Hubel covered one eye of each newborn and found that the brain rewired itself to see just through the uncovered eye—the first example that the brain’s wiring is not static. But even after the cover was removed, the other eye could not readily respond to visual input. Today physicians treat children with visual impairments as early as possible, with better outcomes.
The goal of the Golden Goose Award is to highlight the fact that it’s hard to know the benefits of research funding, except in retrospect. Representative Jim Cooper created it in response to William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award, which targeted federal spending Proxmire considered wasteful. Proxmire often targeted federally funded research of a seemingly obscure nature, and the Golden Goose then is a response that, despite the nature of odd-sounding experiments, the positive results for society can be deep and longlasting.
About the Author:
Christina Szalinski is a science writer with a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.
