The Genius of Cajal

One name that pops up frequently while studying neuroscience is Santiago Ramón y Cajal. His contributions to the field of neuroscience is so vast that he is aptly called the father of neuroscience. Cajal  won the Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine in 1906 for the neuron doctrine that became the basis of neuroscience. Interestingly, he shared the Nobel Prize with his arch rival, Camillo Golgi. Cajal's main contribution was identifying that neurons are individual cells that are biochemically distinct from each other, which directly contradicted the theories of Golgi and many other contemporaries.

Cajal is considered one of history's most brilliant neuroanatomists, but his story is more inspiring than just his contributions to neuroscience. As a child, Cajal was very mischievous and often got into trouble in school. He had to change several schools and finally withdrew from school altogether. His father tried to apprentice him to a barber, then a cobbler, but nothing seemed to work as Cajal was very stubborn and wanted to be an artist. Despite his father's  attempts to suppress his artistic interests, Cajal managed to keep it alive by scraping paint from walls and extracting color from it to paint with.

Although his physician father tried to discourage a career in art, he was still quite nurturing. He took Cajal to a graveyard to draw pictures of bones. Whether it was a clever ploy by his father or just sheer luck, it managed to spark Cajal’s interest in anatomy, and he decided to enroll in university to study medicine. He excelled in dissection and graduated medical school when he was just 21, even winning the prize for top student. Later he became a Professor of Anatomy like his father, and started to work on the nervous system, which led to the great things he would accomplish. 

So what exactly made Cajal so good in neuroscience? It seems it wasn't just his education, but in fact, his artistic background and keen sense of observation that helped him see things that others could not. Cajal used the Golgi staining method to image the nerve cells, the same imaging technique that everyone else used, but he saw things better and deeper than the others. He also improved Golgi’s method by tweaking the chemicals and selectively using neurons, which resulted in a greater proportion of neurons that could be stained, and thus produced more detailed images.

Another interesting thing about Cajal's life is the irony of his achievements. The Golgi method that he relied on for his discoveries was developed by his arch rival, Golgi, who openly clashed with him about his findings. Cajal used Golgi's own technique to prove his theory about neurons being one large interlinked network wrong. And he was acutely aware of the irony:  when Cajal and Golgi were both awarded the Nobel Prize together, he remarked, "What a cruel irony of fate, to pair together, like Siamese twins united by the shoulders, scientific adversaries of such contrasting character!"