Santiago Ramón y Cajal

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852 – October 17, 1934), Nobel laureate, 1906, was a Spanish histologist and is considered to be the father of modern neuroscience.

He was born in Petilla de Aragón, a Navarrese enclave in Aragon, Spain and attended the medical school of Zaragoza, from which he graduated in 1873. He also became a Doctor of Medicine in Madrid in 1883.

He was the director of the Zaragoza Museum (1879). He became a university professor at Valencia (1881), at Barcelona (1886), and at Madrid (1892). He was Director of the National Institute of Hygiene (1899). He founded the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Biológicas (1902) which later became the Cajal Institute (1922).

His most famous studies were on the fine structure of the central nervous system. Cajal used a histological staining technique developed by his contemporary Camillo Golgi. Golgi found that by treating brain tissue with a silver chromate solution, a relatively small amount of neurons in the brain were darkly stained. This allowed him to resolve, in detail, the structure of individual neurons, and led him to conclude that nervous tissue was a continuous reticulum (or web) of interconnected cells, much like the circulatory system. Using Golgi's method, Cajal reached a very different conclusion. He postulated that the nervous system is made up of billions of separate nerve cells (neurons) and that nerve cells are polarized. Rather than form a continuous web, Cajal suggested that neurons communicate with each other via specialized junctions. This hypothesis became the basis of the neuron doctrine, which states that the individual unit of the nervous system is a single neuron. Electron microscopy later showed that a plasma membrane completely enclosed each neuron, proving that Cajal's theory was correct, and Golgi's reticular theory was not. However, with the discovery of electrical synapses, which are direct junctions between nerve cells, some have argued that Golgi was at least partially correct. For this work Cajal and Camillo Golgi shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906.

Ramon y Cajal also proposed that the way axons grow is via a growth cone at their ends. He understood that neural cells could sense chemical signals and move in the proper direction for growth.

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Among his many distinctions and memberships of societies, he was also made an honorary Doctor of Medicine of the Universities of Cambridge and Würzburg, and Doctor of Philosophy of the Clark University. He published over 100 scientific works and articles in French, Spanish and German. Among them are "Rules and advices on scientific investigation," "Histology," "Degeneration and regeneration of the nervous system," "Manual of normal histology and micrographic technique," "Elements of histology, etc.," "Manual of general pathological anatomy," "New ideas on the fine anatomy of the nerve centres," "Textbook on the nervous system of man and the vertebrates," and "The retina of vertebrates."

He married Silveria Fañanás García in 1879 with whom he had four daughters and three sons. He died in Madrid in 1934.

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