Trevor Lamb grew up in Melbourne, Australia. After graduating as an electrical engineer from the University of Melbourne, he went to Cambridge, England, to undertake a PhD. There, he was mentored by Denis Baylor and Alan Hodgkin and, under their guidance, began working on the retina; initially on horizontal cells, and later on photoreceptors. I first met Trevor when he came to Stanford as a post-doctoral fellow in 1977, to join Denis and me. In a very productive collaboration, we developed the suction pipette technique, and we used it to demonstrate that rods could respond reliably to individual photons of light. Trevor then returned to Cambridge, where I joined him a couple of years later, when I went for a post-doctoral fellowship in Alan Hodgkin’s laboratory.
In Cambridge, Trevor held several research fellowships, before being appointed a lecturer, then a reader, and in 1994 a full professor in the Department of Physiology. In 2003 he returned to Australia, to a prestigious Federation Fellowship in the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University.
Edward Pugh grew up in Waco, Texas. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama, in 1968. A National Science Foundation graduate fellow, he received a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1970 as part of the PhD program in mathematical psychology, which he completed in 1972 in the laboratory of Mathew Alpern, himself a winner of the Friedenwald Medal awarded by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in 1974. In the same year, Ed moved to the University of Pennsylvania as Assistant Professor of Psychology, where he advanced through the academic ranks, becoming an associate professor in 1978 and a professor in 1983. In 1999, Ed joined the Department of Ophthalmology at Penn as the Jules and Doris Stein Research to Prevent Blindness Professor.
Ed has received several major awards, including the first Troland Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and the Alcon Research Award, jointly awarded to Trevor and Ed in 2003.
Trevor and Ed first met in 1978 at a meeting in Sussex, and there they discovered their mutual interests in two areas of visual science: phototransduction and dark adaptation. Trevor was analyzing photoreceptor dark adaptation and asked Ed about the human psychophysical results that he had published. Ed sent Trevor a spare copy of his PhD thesis. This served as the basis for a 1981 paper and also for their most recent collaborative effort, a long-sought synthesis of “Dark Adaptation and the Retinoid Cycle of Vision” published in Progress in Retinal and Eye Research in 2004. Over the years they have focused much of their collaborative energy on the quantitative analysis of fundamental visual processes in photoreceptors. Their lecture today will summarize and update their now classic contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the kinetics and amplification of the photoresponses of rods and cones.