Allvar GullstrandBorn 5 Jun 1862; died 21 Jul 1930 at age 68.Swedish ophthalmologist, recipient of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on the eye as a light-refracting apparatus. Hermann von Helmholtz had earlier shown that the eye solves the problem of accommodation (how to focus on both near and distant objects) by changing the surface curvature of the lens - the nearer the object, the more convex the lens becomes; the further the object, the more concave the lens. Gullstrand showed that this could in fact account for only two thirds of the accommodation a normal eye could achieve. The remaining third was produced by what Gullstrand termed the “intracapsular mechanism”and depended on the fact that the eye was not a homogeneous medium.[DSB gives date of death 21 Jul 1930. EB gives 28 Jul 1930.] |
