Why did Glaser switch from physics to biology?
I got restless. After the bubble chamber, I felt like I'd solved a big problem in high-energy physics, and I wanted a new challenge. Biology was wide open—especially the visual system, which fascinated me because it's all about detecting and processing signals, just like a particle detector. I didn't know a thing about biology when I started, and that was an advantage. I could ask naive questions and build gadgets that biologists hadn't thought of. For example, I designed experiments to study how ionizing radiation affects the retina, using microelectrodes to record from single cells. I also worked on neural circuits in the retina, trying to map out how they compute motion and contrast. Physics gave me a toolkit—electronics, optics, data analysis—and I just applied it to a new set of problems. The best way to understand something is to make a picture of it, whether it's a particle track or a neural signal.
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