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Microspectrophotometry of Photoreceptors

  • Chapter
Photochemistry of Vision

Part of the book series: Handbook of Sensory Physiology ((1536,volume 7 / 1))

Abstract

In nearly thirty intervening years we have not overcome the exasperation so poetically expressed by Gordon Walls, for in achieving the conditions of illumination under which our own cones “see” color, the important somethings of the cones we observe are inevitably destroyed. It would no doubt have been of great satisfaction to Walls, himself an engineer, to know that the technical revolution, which has steadily progressed since the wedding of the physical sciences with biology, would so soon extend man’s senses to make possible the detection of the invisible, and thus, in a fashion perhaps even more satisfactory than detection directly by the experimenter’s own eye, enable us to observe the invisible somethings in nearly any of the “completely colorless structures” he spent his life examining. It is an arresting coincidence that it was the very “living cones” of frog and goldfish mentioned in Walls’ rhetoric whose “bland innocence” was first denied through discovery of their contained pigments by microspectrophotometry.

In truth, the working out of the photochemical system of the cone may long continue to seem the most difficult branch of the physiology of the eye…. With the very sloppiest of technique, we can mount the fresh dark-adapted retina of a frog or a goldfish on the microscope and still see the rich wine of rhodopsin filling its rods. But with the most careful of methods, we can succeed in seeing living cones only as completely colorless structures, whose bland innocence conceals invisible traces of three important somethings — to our utter exasperation.

(G. L. Walls, 1942)

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    P. A. Liebman

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Herbert J. A. Dartnall

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Liebman, P.A. (1972). Microspectrophotometry of Photoreceptors. In: Dartnall, H.J.A. (eds) Photochemistry of Vision. Handbook of Sensory Physiology, vol 7 / 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-65066-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-65066-6_12

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