George Wald (November 18, 1906 – April 12, 1997) was an American scientist and activist who studied pigments in the retina.

He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.

Wald used this grant to work in Germany with Otto Heinrich Warburg where he identified vitamin A in the retina.

[5] He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1950, the American Philosophical Society in 1958,[6] and in 1967 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries in vision.

Wald spoke out on many political and social issues and his fame as a Nobel laureate brought national and international attention to his views.

While there, he questioned Gorbachev about the arrest, detention and exile of Yelena Bonner and her husband, fellow Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov (Peace prize, 1975).

His further experiments showed that when the pigment rhodopsin was exposed to light, it yielded the protein opsin and a compound containing vitamin A.