Recollections of My Life

"The neuron—the fundamental building block of neuroscience —was validated with the 1906 Nobel Prize… but not without the co-winners Ramon y Cajal and Camillo Golgi volubly airing disagreement from the podium. Cajal re-lived the acrimony in Stockholm in Recollections of My Life , That’s as good a starting point as any (unless you’re partial to the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus , dating from circa 1600 BC). The book details his first attempts at scientific investigation in the late 1880s—when his adaptation of Golgi’s stain of silver bichromate allowed the hitherto impenetrable thicket of neurons, axons, dendrites, and glia to be penetrated by the reazione nera , which “picks out certain nerve cells to the absolute exclusion of others.” To this day we still don’t know how a particular neuron is ‘picked’ to take up the stain but in that heroic age of histology “the gain in the brain was mainly in the stain.” Mapping of the fine structure of the nervous system had begun, and Cajal’s marvelous histologic drawings are scattered throughout the book. In the 1880s the anatomy of the neuron was up for grabs, and in Europe and Scandinavia Wilhelm His, August-Henri Forel, and Fridtjof Nansen (who gave it up for Arctic exploration, eventually winning a Nobel Peace Prize) were in hot pursuit but it was Santiago Ramon y Cajal who must be regarded as the “chief architect of the neuron theory.” Based on his thousands of drawings of neurons, some with free endings and discontinuities of Golgi-stained axons and dendrites extending from neuron cell bodies, he drew the irresistible conclusion that the neuron was a discrete bounded structure and not part of a continuous network, or syncytium. History has vindicated Cajal’s neuron doctrine, but it was not until the 1950s that Sanford Palay’s electron microscopy fully revealed the boundary line or ‘synapse’ separating neurons."